Prof. Liz Gunner

Liz Gunner is Visiting Professor, Global Stature and Excellence, in the Department of Languages, Cultural Studies and Applied Linguistics (LanCSAL) University of Johannesburg. She obtained her PhD in African Languages and Literatures from SOAS, University of London, and her focus was on Zulu praise poetry (izibongo). Her work is on orality and social meaning in an African context, on political song in South Africa, on gender and orature, and on media, especially radio. Her recent books are Radio Soundings: South Africa and the Black Modern (2019); Radio in Africa: Publics, Cultures, Communities, eds. Liz Gunner, Dina Ligaga and Dumisani Moyo (2012), and earlier, Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature, eds Graham Furniss and Liz Gunner (2008). Liz is working on a book on music and precarity in post-1994 South Africa that might be called, ‘The Road, the Song and the Citizen’. It focuses on a genre located inside and outside ‘the popular’, called ‘isicathamiya’, from a Zulu word, -cathama - ‘to walk on tiptoe’.