Professor studies gender, race and writing in wartime South Africa
January 11, 2000
Wheaton College Associate Professor of English Paula M. Krebs completed an exhaustive study of the role of public discourse in the Boer War with the recent release of Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Through the war writings of Authur Conan Doyle, Olive Schreiner, H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, as well as contemporary journalism, propaganda and other forms of public discourse, Krebs examines the last of the "gentleman’s wars"—the Boer War of 1899-1902—and the struggles to maintain late-Victorian imperialist hegemony in a twentieth century world. Krebs’ feminist analysis of such issues as the sexual honor of the British soldier at war, the deaths of thousands of women and children in concentration camps and new concepts of race in South Africa marks this book as a significant contribution to British imperial studies.
Krebs holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University and serves as chair of Wheaton’s English Department. Other recent scholarly publications include "Olive Schreiner's Racialization of South Africa," published in Victorian Studies 40.3 (Spring 1997), and "Folklore, Fear, and the Feminine: Ghosts and Old Wives’ Tales in Wuthering Heights," published in Victorian Literature and Culture 26.1 (Fall 1998).