Chris Thurman

Welcome to Chris Thurman's online portfolio

I'm a lecturer in the English Department at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, South Africa. I set up this website in 2007 while I was working as a freelance academic, journalist, editor and copywriter; it allowed me to refer colleagues, publishers and current or potential clients to examples of my work.

Since joining Wits at the beginning of 2008, however, I have been encouraged to maintain this online portfolio and to update it with new articles that have appeared in the print media and with other publications.

The university environment may be intellectually oriented, but I'd like to think that I'm not out of touch with the world outside the ivory towers. Moreover, I'm convinced that there is a place for writing that bridges "academic" and "popular" discourses, facilitating the circulation of ideas in the public sphere.

Enjoy browsing through the site!

Latest

On Gulliver and "poor" academics

This article first appeared in The MAIL & GUARDIAN

27th August 2010

View online here

Popular impressions of Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels are probably best captured in the words of Samuel Johnson: “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.” Those who have read beyond the first two parts of the book, which recount Gulliver’s voyages to Lilliput (the little men) and Brobdingnag (the big men), may also remember the fourth and final section in which the protagonist washes up on the shores of a country ruled by horses – a depiction of human-equine communication that predates Mr Ed and The Horse Whisperer by a few centuries.

Yet the often-neglected third part of the book offers some of the most intriguing resonances with our own time, foreshadowing a range of modern phenomena from genetically-modified foods to the infinite monkey theorem. It is in this section that Gulliver comes across an academy of “projectors”, a group of nutty professors with hygiene problems who are engaged in various forms of theoretically interesting but utterly impractical research. Their “projects” include extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, reconstituting human excrement as food and turning ice into gunpowder.