Pumla is a feminist author and Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Nelson Mandela University, where she holds the South African Research Chair in African Feminist Imagination. She has authored five books, including the landmark What is Slavery to Me? Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2010), Rape: A South African Nightmare (winner of the 2016 Alan Paton Award), and Female Fear Factory: Unravelling Patriarchy’s Cultures of Violence. Pumla’s coinage of the phrase “the female fear factory” earned the 2023 Breakthrough Award in Humanities and Social Sciences from the Falling Walls Foundation in Berlin. Outside academia, Pumla is on the Board of Trustees of the Women’s Legal Centre, an African feminist strategic litigation firm, and previously chaired the board of the 1in9 Campaign, a feminist non-profit. She has also served on the boards of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) Press and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR).