Robert J Balfour is a National Research Foundation-rated academic. He has published frequently on language learning and literacy, rural education and postcolonial literature, andis featured widely in the popular press for perspectives on multilingualism and education. In 2011 he was appointed as Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Education Sciences on the Potchefstroom Campus of North West University, and was appointed as Deputy Vice Chancellor (Teaching and Learning) in mid-2017. Besides being an applied linguist, postcolonial literary critic and educationist, Balfour is an exhibited painter, exhibiting for the first time in a group exhibition in Cambridge in 2003, and then at ArtSpace Gallery in Durban in 2007, 2015 and 2023 respectively. Occasionally, Balfour has also published poetry and short fiction in literary journals in the USA, Australia and South Africa. He believes cr eative and scholarly work to be complementary.