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Colleen Jane Taylor (born 19 April 1956) is a South African writer and academic.In 1987 she and David Bunn co-edited From South Africa (University of Chicago Press), an anthology which documents the Years of Emergency in the last decade of Apartheid in that country, through new photography, graphics, literature and essays.In 1993, she presented a paper at theUniversity of Cape Town's Centre for African Studies Conference in which she considered the 'relationship between Enlightenment linguistic philosophy, global mercentilism, colonialism, and nascent nationalism" in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.In 1994 she and David Bunn curated the exhibition "Displacements" at the Block Gallery, Northwestern University, and in 1996, she curated "Fault Lines," an exhibition at Cape Town Castle on truth and reconciliation. "FAULT LINES" was also, more broadly, a series of cultural responses which she initiated in order to draw artists from the international community into a series of events exploring the discourses and practices of Truth and Reconciliation. She also wrote the playtext of "Ubu and the Truth Commission" with artist/director William Kentridge and Handspring Puppet Company (see Wikipedia entry, "Ubu and the Truth Commission"). In 2001 she wrote the libretto for "The Confessions of Zeno" for Kentridge and Handspring. She has recently edited "Handspring Puppet Company" (David Krut publishers, 2009), a substantial study of this world renowned South African performance troupe.She was a co-editor of "Refiguring the Archive", a volume which surveyed the field of archive fever in the last decade (Kluwer Academic Press); and curated the exhibition, "Holdings", which engaged with the question of value, the archive and memory.She received the prestigious Olive Schreiner Prize for new fiction for her "Of Wild Dogs" in 2006.In 2009 she published "The Transplant Men", a novel that examines the controversial South African heart surgeon, Chris Barnard.She has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Chicago; and at Oxford and Cambridge Universities; as well as a Rockefeller Fellow at Emory University, Atlanta.

From 2000 to 2009 she was the Skye Chair of Dramatic Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Jane Taylor", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0