Seminars

The English Department hosts a number of regular  seminars, given by staff and associates, visiting speakers, or graduate students. Seminars address an expansive variety of literary-cultural subjects.

Public research seminars are generally held on Thursdays between 12 and 1pm. These will be advertised on the website, and on SU noticeboards. (See list below, for examples of past presentations.)

Closed, department-only seminars are held on 4 scheduled Thursdays per term (advertised internally). This recent innovation allows staff, associates and senior students to present work-in-progress, linked to one’s research autobiography.  What are you currently researching? How did you arrive at this focus? What are the challenges? How can you overcome them?

2022

For more information, contact Dr Uhuru Phalafala.

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17 October 2019: Hedley Twidle (UCT). Unusable Pasts: Life Writing, Literary Biography and the Limits of Research

10 October 2019: Mark Sanders (NYU). Automation and Apartheid: Office Literature by Miriam Tlali and J.M. Coetzee

26 September 2019: Meg Samuelson (Adelaide). An Alphabet Spanning the Seas.

16 September 2019: Karen Jennings. Launch of her new novel Upturned Earth [CANCELLED]

5 September 2019: Ishion Hutchinson. Conversation with the Jamaican poet and essayist.

29 August 2019: Steph Newell (Yale). Ephemeral Texts: Experiments with Literary Lontent and Form in Early West African Newspapers

22 August 2019: Patrick Flanery . Patronage. Author reading from a work in progress.

15 August 2019: Tribute to Toni Morrison 1931-2019. Readings and Reflections by Staff and Students.

6 June 2019: Oscar Ortega Montero (Barcelona). HIV/Aids: (Dis)closing National Trauma in Contemporary South African Life Writing

16 May 2019: Julie Nxadi (Andrew Mellon Writer-in-Residence). Mis-Over-Seen: Opacity, Obscurity & the Right to Fantasy

2 May 2019: Rita Barnard (UPA). Dictator Games: On Shame, Shitholes and Beautiful Things

25 April 2019:  Carli Coetzee (SOAS) –  Reading the Bloods: Inter-generational Memory in the Time of the #Fallists

18 April 2019: Sally-Ann Murray (SU). Woman. Writing. Otherwise Occupied, Poetry Book Launch

11 April 2019: Nicky Falkof (WITS) – White Genocide and the Marketing of Minority Victims

04 April 2019:  Paula Fourie. “Little Man You’ve Had a Busy Day”: Music in the onstage and offstage lives of Master Harold

13 March 2019: Oscar Hemer (Malmö) & Cheryl Stobie (UKZN). Precarity and Conviviality: Towards A Politics of Rethinking Democracy

7 March 2019: Scott Eric Williams. #Archivalgangsterism: Handling the Archive Without Gloves

2018

  • 18 October 2018: Peter Kalliney (UKY) – Decolonization and the Aesthetic Cold War: Towards an Intellectual History
  • 11 October 2018: Simon van Schalkwyk (Wits) – Risky Business: Analysts, Janissaries, and Weh-Weh Men in Don DeLillo’s The Names, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland
  • 4 October 2018:  Yvette Dickson-Tetteh (Writivism Fellow) – Essays at Essays:  Discovering Writing as Process and Creation
  • 27 September 2018:  Prof Annie Gagiano (SU) – Reading Africa through Fiction:  A personal history (with remifications) resulting from a preference for routes over roots.
  • 20 September 2018:  Gabeba Baderoon – Book Launch – The History of Intimacy (Poems)
  • 6 September 2018:  Q & A with Nicole Dennis-Benn – Here comes the Sun (a novel)
  • 30 August 2018:  Sean Metzger (UCLA) – Fashioning Gender and other Methodologies for Cultural Enquiry
  • 16 August 2018:  Stephanie Newell (Yale) – Histories of Dirt in West Africa
  • 3 May 2018: Louise Green (SU) – Pangolin Falling
  • 19 April 2018: Dennis Francis (SU) – Keeping it Straight
  • 12 April 2018:  Zahira Asmal (The City) – Visibility and Voice in the Creole City
  • 22 March 2018:  James Arnett (UCT) – Brain Drain, Brain Gain – THe Futures Market for African Science in Deji Bryce Olukotun’s Nigerians in Space
  • 15 March 2018:  Monika Pietrzak-Franger (Hamburg) – Hygeia – Imagining a Healthy City
  • 8 March 2018:  Peter Wagner (Koblenz-Landau) – Thinking the Rhizome in Literature
  • 1 March 2018:  Denise Decaires Narain (Sussex) – One of the Family: Maids, Madams and the autobiographical
  • 22 February 2018:  Susanne Rohr (Hamburg) – Screening Madness in American Culture
  • 9 February 2018: Uhuru Phalafala (SU) – Setswana Language and Literature’s Trans-Atlantic Arch in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s Poetry
  • 16 February 2018: Nick Mulgrew (UCT) – How to Fail in Literature

2017

  • 2 March 2017: Aidan Erasmus (UWC) – White Noise. Soundscapes
  • 9 March 2017: Francine Simon (SU) – Launch of debut poetry collection Thungachi (uHlanga)
  • 16 March 2017: Rosa Lyster (UCT) – A Very Bad Book: Apartheid Censorship and the First Bannned South African Novel
  • 23 March 2017: Evan Mwangi (Northwestern) – Africanist/Indian Ocean Epistemologies and the Animal Question
  • 20 April 2017: Sean O’Toole (UCT) – Let Me Show You My Clippings
  • 4 May 2017: Fred Khumalo: Launch of the novel Dancing the Death Drill (Umuzi), on the sinking of the SS Mendi
  • 11 May 2017: Locations & Locutions panel on ‘South Africa and Africa: Scanning the Future’, featuring  Yvonne Owuor,  Sope Williams-Elegbe, and Grace Musila
  • 27 July 2017: Marciana Were (SU) – Polar Subject, Perilous Stories: Intricacies of Narrating Authentic Warriorhood in the Testimonials of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Mamphela Ramphele
  • 3 August 2017: Ranka Primorac (Southampton) – Narrating an African Periphery
  • 17 August 2017: Taban Lo Liyong – Harmonics of Abolition
  • 31 August 2017: ‘Strike a Rock’, panel discussion
  • 14 September 2017: Fernando Rosa (SU)- Academic and Other Freedoms Post-Doklam: Corporatisation, Censorship, and the BRICS Xiamen 2017 Summit
  • 21 September 2017: Keguro Macharia – Fanon, Blackness, Sexuality
  • 28 September 2017: Dean Hutton (UCT) – Dazzle: Confusion, Concealment and Surveillance of the White Body
  • 05 October 2017: David Attwell (York) – The Comedy of Seriousness in J.M. Coetzee
  • 19 October 2017: Jakkie Cilliers (ISS) – Fate of the Nation
  • 26 October 2017: Danyela Demir (UJ) – Trauma, Resistance, and Music in Lesego Rampolokeng’s Latest Works