Pumla Dineo Gqola is  the Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and the NMU-DSI-NRF SARChI Chair in African Feminist Imaginations at Nelson Mandela University. Previously she was a Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Classical Culture at the University of the Free State, and the Chief Research Specialist in the Societies, Culture, and Identities Research Programme of the Human Sciences Research Council. A graduate of the Universities of Cape Town and Warwick, she holds a doctorate in postcolonial studies from the University of Munich (LMU) in Germany.

Professor Gqola is the author of the ground-breaking study on slave memory in South Africa, What Is Slavery To Me? Postcolonial/Slave Memory In Post-Apartheid South Africa. Rape: A South African Nightmare, which won the 2016 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction, is another of her landmark publications. Her other books are A Renegade Called Simphiwe, Reflecting Rogue: Inside The Mind Of A Feminist, and Miriam Tlali: Writing Freedom, and Female Fear Factory.

Among her illustrious awards are the 2016 Ruth First Fellowship from the University of Witwatersrand, the 2016 Alan Paton Award for Rape: A South African Nightmare, the 2018 University of Cape Town President of Convocation Award, the 2022 HSS Best Non-Fiction Monograph Award from the South African National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) for Female Fear Factory, the 2022 Brittle Paper Academic of the Year Award, the 2023 German Falling Walls Foundation Breakthrough Award in Humanities and Social Sciences, the  2023 DLitt (honoris causa) from the University of Stellenbosch, The 2024 Fellowship in Black Feminism and the Polycrisis from The New Institute, and the 2024 CANEX Prize for Publishing in Africa.