Writing the South African San

​Lara Atkin is Lecturer in Victorian Literature and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies at the University of Kent, UK. After graduating with a PhD in English Literature from Queen Mary University of London in 2017, she worked as an ERC-funded postdoctoral resarch fellow on the project ‘SouthHem’ based in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. She is co-author of Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere (Palgrave, 2019, with Sarah Comyn et al).

Chapter 1: Literature and Ethnology: Towards a Theory of "Ethnographic Poetics".- Chapter 2: Representing the Khoisan c. 1600-1800.- Chapter 3: Better to Be Naked and Free than to Wear Clothes and Be Oppressed: Indigenous Uses of Humanitarian Discourse.- Chapter 4: "The South African 'Children of the Mist'": The Bushman, the Highlander, and the Making of Colonial Identity in Thomas Pringle's South African Poetry.- Chapter 5: The "Bushboy" in Children's Literature: Missionary Ethnography and Imperial Adventure Fiction.- Chapter 6: Encountering Southern Africa: The Display of Khoisan Peoples in London.- Chapter 7: Conclusion: The Colonial Encounter and Identity Formation.