From 22 to 30 September, PhD candidate Nhlanhla Dube attended The Third Summer Institute for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Funded Project on “Entanglement, Mobility and Improvisation: Culture and the Arts in Contemporary African Urbanism and its Hinterlands”. The Summer Institute was held in Accra, Ghana and he presented work from his ongoing research. Nhlanhla is due to defend his PhD at the end of November, 2023.
Conference Convenor: Dr Jeanne Ellis, Honours Coordinator jellis@sun.ac.za
Conference Committee 2023: Sam Adair (Hon), Lobke Minter (PhD), Lucinda Roberts (Hon), Julia Snyckers (MA), Danie Stander (Postdoc), Joha van Dyk (PhD), Jaime Watkins (Hon)
postgradconference2023@gmail.com
“Love and the global south” Honours students were fortunate enough to meet and have a special Q&A session with Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, author of The Sex Lives of African Women .
Dr Nadia Sanger and the panellists of “Constructed Identities”. From left, Thandiwe Ntshinga (author of Black Racist Bitch), Nadia Sanger, Lynsey Ebony Chutel (co-author of Coloured: How Classification Became Culture), Pieter Odendaal (author of Ontaard) and Akin Sanger-Samuels.
The event was part of the EACLALS 2023 conference at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, “Imagining Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World”. A sizeable Stellenbosch contingent including Prof. Louise Green, Dr Eckard Smuts, Prof. Maria Olaussen, Mr Fred Aluoch and Dr Megan Jones presented work on topics from plastic, to photography, to islands, to rivers and even to the politics of sand.
Subcommittee A: Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for 2023
Department of English, Stellenbosch University
(This grant of R250 000.00 is awarded for one year, with possible extension to a second year depending on availability of funds)
Host: Dr Jeanne Ellis, Department of English, Stellenbosch University
Project Title: Nineteenth-Century Settler Colonialism Re-Storied and Re-Staged
Scope of Research: Given the popular trend in recent historical fiction to return to the Victorian era and the critical attention it has received, particularly under the rubric of neo-Victorian studies, this project endeavours to establish the fictional turn to histories of settler colonialism as an especially productive site for theorising the possibilities and risks of the neo-Victorian. Lorenzo Veracini’s contention that “[t]he stories settlers tell themselves and about themselves are crucial to an exploration of settler colonial subjectivities” (Settler Colonialism, 103) provides the point of departure for its proposition that the restorying of nineteenth-century settler colonialism in literary texts, theatrical production, films, television series, and visual art from the perspective of post-settler subjects whose genealogies are entangled with such histories continue to warrant close, sustained scrutiny. Noting the dearth of published research on the role of theatre in neo-Victorianism’s critical revision of settler colonial histories, this project provides a research opportunity to a young scholar whose graduate research on a relevant aspect of South African theatre studies and / or neo-Victorian studies has established the appropriate foundation for collaborative and independent publication on the restaging – as a counterpart term to restorying – of nineteenth-century settler histories.
Requirements: PhD (must have graduated within the last five years). The applicant’s doctoral research and the application for the fellowship should intersect with the field of study outlined above. The postdoctoral fellow will be expected to write and submit at least two articles to accredited journals by the end of the funded period and to teach one second-year English Studies elective in the second semester of 2023.
Postdoctoral research fellows are not eligible for employee benefits since they are registered as fellows and their bursaries are awarded tax free.
Please send your CV and a 1000-word project proposal to Jeanne Ellis at jellis@sun.ac.za.
The closing date for applications is 23 May 2023.
Dr Lauren van der Rede, currently a lecturer in the Department of English at Stellenbosch University, has been awarded the BECHS-Africa Fellowship and will be in residence as an Early Career Humanities Scholar at the University of Ghana in the latter half of 2023. Her research thinks the intersection of annihilatory violence, such as genocide, literary and cultural studies, and psychoanalysis from and through Africa in relation to the question of memory. She received her PhD in English Literature from the University of the Western Cape, where she was also a Next Generation Researcher based at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR). Beyond developing her own scholarship, as part of her time at the University of Ghana, she will also offer a workshop focused around her research.
Louise Green’s Fragments from the History of Loss: The Nature Industry and the Postcolony (Penn State, 2020) was described by the Review Panel as, “exceptionally well-written, powerful, provocative and an excellent scholarship across a range of disciplines”, while Tina Steiner’s Convival Worlds. Writing Relation from Africa (Routledge, 2021) was recognised as “an excellent text that is well-written and beautifully theorized”.
Congrats to both! The awards ceremony will take place in March 2023.
As part of a South-South collaborative project between Dr BMN College (Autonomous) in Mumbai, the postgraduate Department of English, SNDT Women’s University in Mumbai, and the English Department at Stellenbosch University, we invite you to two public lectures taking place at STIAS on Thursday, the 6th April between 10 and 11am.
Prof Mala Pandurang (Dr BMN College): Global South Connectivities: Exploring Pedagogical Possibilities, and Dr Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay (SNDT Women’s University): Feminist assemblages in the Global South: Notes from contemporary Literary Practices.
