Lucy Valerie Graham is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Johannesburg. She has a doctorate in English literature from the University of Oxford, and MA, BA Honours, and BA degrees from the university currently known as Rhodes. Her first monograph, State of Peril: Race and Rape in South African Literature (2012), was published by Oxford University Press. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and is working on two new monographs, on J.M. Coetzee and gender, and one entitled “Post-Apartheid Dissonance”, about the cultural politics of post-“rainbow nation” South Africa. She is co-editor, with Andrew van der Vlies, of the Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee (2023). Her research interests include South African and African literature and culture, interdisciplinary studies, and debates on intersectionality and decoloniality. Her new work includes a focus on ecocriticism, including cultural rights and the environment.

In 2013-14 she was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University, where she taught courses in the English Department. At NYU she also organised a colloquium in 2014 on “South Africa after Twenty Years of Democracy” (outputs available in the journal Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies). In 2017 she was project manager of The Mendi Centenary Project, for which she received a British Academy Grant. In April 2018 she toured universities in the US with a group of students from the University of the Western Cape who presented on “Fallism and the cultural politics of decolonisation.” In May-June 2022 she was in Brazil by invitation to present in a series of seminars and events on “Decolonising the arts and social sciences.” In December 2024 she was invited to give a keynote address in an AHRC-funded workshop at Durham Law School on “Extractive Industries and the Foreign Security Network”. In 2025 she presented a paper at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre of African Studies Conference on “Climate Dynamics and the Politics of a Post-Carbon Africa”, and a paper entitled “From the Mountain to the Sea: Cultural Rights v Extractivism” in seminars at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford.