In her twenties, Ranka Primorac left her country of birth in peripheral Europe and spent the best part of a decade working and studying in Harare, Zimbabwe. This act of self-displacement (and those that followed) informs her academic practice to this day: she teaches and research issues to do with global economic and cultural unevenness, and how this affects the circulation and social functioning of world-literary forms.
Ranka’s first monograph, The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe (2006) charts the formal decolonisation of Zimbabwe via the novel’s engagement with the social production of space-time. She is currently at work on a second, provisionally titled The Queues of Limitless Hope, to do with representations of modern subjectivity in times of social crisis in Southern Africa. Ranka has degrees from the universities of Zagreb, Zimbabwe and Nottingham Trent. She is currently an associate professor of African literature at the University of Southampton and a co-editor of the Boydell and Brewer monograph series African Articulations. Read more about her work here: [link to personal website]