The Director of the Centre for Humanities Research, Professor Premesh Lalu, will be visiting Trinity Long Room Arts and Humanities Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland. Professor Lalu will be a visiting research fellow at Trinity Long Room from January to March 2019. The fellowship is held in partnership with Trinity School of Creative Arts.

Professor Lalu will focus on a research project entitled ‘The Practice of Post-Apartheid Freedom’:

Two central questions will inform this study. One, how do we read the history of apartheid as a process of the becoming technical of the human, and two, how might we retrieve a concept of technics from its implication in technology so that it becomes available for an aesthetic education adequate to the tasks of defining postapartheid freedom? Taken together, these questions lend themselves to a history of apartheid that takes seriously its global precedents as well as its potential unravelling in an age of rapid shifts in the technological resources of the world. Situated in the interstice of aesthetics and history, the project brings each to bear on the distributions of the sensible, especially in an instance when apartheid signalled the partition of the sensible. Beyond its disciplinary intervention, the work also substantially asks what it might mean for a humanities enquiry to think ahead, beyond the inheritance of the long twentieth century.