News
English Department colleagues were delighted to be among those invited by the Vice Chancellor, Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng, and Chair of the Academic Freedom Committee, Professor Elelwani Ramugondo, to the TB Davie pre-lecture dinner to welcome Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola.
Black Archives and Intellectual Histories is a Mellon funded seminar series that features eminent scholars, activists and public intellectuals from South Africa, the continent and across the Black Atlantic. This seminar series focuses on black intellectual histories and the question of the archive, paying particular attention to epistemologies, narrative, cultural production, social movements and collectives in relation to the geo-politics of the black diaspora and South Africa’s place in its imaginaries. These seminars are part of the ongoing conversation about the decolonization of higher education in South Africa, in particular how black intellectual histories can contribute to the transformation of the curriculum.
Dr Rosa Lyster’s thesis, A History of Apartheid Censorship Through the Archive, was described by one examiner as ‘as close to an ideal PhD as I have ever encountered’, and commended for its ‘substantial contribution to South African literary scholarship and the study of censorship’. Read an interview with Rosa on her project by PEN South Africa.
Dr Tara Leverton’s research into Madmen and Mad Money: Psychological Disability and Economics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature was commended as ‘well-conceived, well-researched and well-argued piece of scholarship that undoubtedly makes a contribution to knowledge in (at least) three intersecting fields: disability studies, literary studies and, indeed, medieval and early modern historiography’.
Warm congratulations to Tara and Rosa for these excellent results.
Assoc. Prof. Harry Garuba’s poem gets published as the poem of the week in the Guardian newspaper