Featured Publications
Sickness in Style: A Memoir of Distress and Dislocation through Dress
2025
Lived Places Publishing
How can dress impact a journey through disabling illness and recovery from South Africa to London? Navigating the development of her complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from her home in South Africa, to university in Oxford, and recovery in London, author Nica Cornell uses the garments she travelled with to reflect on her experience. Cornell explores the effect of garments such as her Ankara sheath dress, Sub fusc, and second-hand clothing, and how they influenced her experience of alienation, exclusion, and realisation. Sickness in Style explores the challenges of dressing and how it can become an obstacle to accessing the external world, as well as how beauty can be rediscovered through second-hand outfits. This book is ideal reading for students of Fashion Studies, Disability Studies, Psychology, and Migration Studies.
Inyathi Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili: Theorising South African Women's Intellectual Legacies
2024
African Sun Media
This book seeks to create a systematic, eclectic, historical picture of the present and past women intellectuals, activists, artists, and cultural custodians. Using the concept of ‘ukufukama’ (incubate) we connect intergenerational knowledge transfer of our elders to the current struggles faced by the younger generation of women.
2023
Mwanaka Media and Publishing
‘There are countless poets of the body, but in Cornell’s hands women’s bodies bleed, and leak and ache, they become sites of explicit corporeal information so that we cannot ignore them. They are “never small, never light, always all” – brought to the forefront, not as palatable or acceptable, but as an act of confrontation and resistance.’ – Sarah Lubala, award-winning poet
![Granny Be(a) [Spanish]](https://nicacornell.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/pub-cover-1862.webp)
