Biography

Thato Magano teaches courses on early modern and contemporary histories of race, gender and sexuality. Thato received an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University, and an M.A. in African Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand. Thato is currently completing Ph.D.’s in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University and in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Leiden University. Thato is co-editor of the forthcoming volumes, The Languages and Scripts of Early Written African Literature (2027) and Being Black in Rural South Africa During and After Apartheid (2027). Thato’s current research project, “Sodomy’s Golden Age: Sex, Race and Citizenship in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Empire (1600-1730),” explores the sexual and non-sexual implications of sodomy as a foundational trope to discourses of nation-making across differing geographies of colonization in the Dutch empire. The project is temporally and geographically comparative, drawing on early modern and contemporary archives from the three Atlantic urban centers of Amsterdam, New Netherland/New York and Cape of Good Hope/Cape Town. Thato’s creative practice—fiction, poetry, and criticism—has appeared on various platforms.