[2] After completing her PhD, Hofmeyr remained at Wits, serving as a senior lecturer in African Literature between 1992 and 1993.
[2] Hofmeyr's earlier scholarship focused on oral literature, textual circulation, and related intellectual traditions in Africa, but she later developed a significant interest in Indian Ocean studies, including textual circulation in the Indian Ocean world, interactions between Africa and India, and the global literary and cultural positioning of the Global South.
In line with this interest, she played a central role in establishing the Wits Centre for Indian Studies in Africa,[4] which she led as acting director in 2009.
The first, entitled We Spend our Years as a Tale that is Told: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom (1993), adapted her dissertation research about oral tradition in South Africa; it was shortlisted for the American African Studies Association's 1995 Herskovits Prize.
[4] The third, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (2003), studies the production of Indian Opinion, the newspaper founded by Mahatma Gandhi and printed at his ashram in Phoenix, Natal; Hofmeyr argued that the material production of the newspaper supported and informed the Gandhian philosophy of satyagraha.
In 2023, the book won the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences's Best Non-Fiction Monograph Award.