Visual History & Theory is a research platform at the University of the Western Cape that promotes a critical engagement with the image in relation to other forms of knowledge production, creativity and contest in Africa and elsewhere. The ‘visual turn’ too often associates visual culture with the invention of technical media, which tends to put Africa at the limit of modernity. It has been our task to rethink hegemonic histories and theories of vision from this limit, opening the way to re-theorise the humanities more globally. Visual History therefore explores inter-disciplinary approaches to images as a way of rethinking history, society, and culture.
Graduates of the UWC Visual History programme are making a strong impact on the growing field of global photography studies, such as the 2019 edited volume Ambivalent. Photography and Visibility in African History (https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Ambivalent). We continue to produce original work that:
Visual History and Theory considers multiple histories, sciences, and forms of knowledge over time in order to promote the type of critical skills needed to grasp the cultural and political magnitude of dramatically increasing media literacies that are already shaping our future.
The workshops aim to promote and sustain a conversation amongst the growing community of trans-generational scholars engaged in new research in visual
The Visual History research platform is convened by the DSI/NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory (UID 98911) and hosts a number of postgraduate student bursaries and postdoctoral fellowships.
The course offers students the opportunity to become skilled in both the historical and cultural analysis of images, and their production. The focus
The 2024 Visual History and Theory Workshop will take place on 19-20 September at the CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab.
This year’s Visual History and Theory Workshop Keynote will be delivered by Christopher Morton, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
Abstracts are invited for participation in the annual workshop in Visual History & Theory to be held at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, on 19-20 September 2024.
This year’s NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory Workshop will take place between 27-28 July. It coalesces around the title, ‘Power: Remaking selves, archives, environments’, and will include a keynote by Leigh Raiford who is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
Premesh Lalu’s documentary film, The Double Future’s of Athlone, which was sold out at the Encounters documentary film festival in Cape Town and Johannesburg, will be screened online at the Durban International Film Festival from July 21-30, 2022.
The African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) is pleased to announce that the 2023 ACIP Workshop will be Archiving Otherwise: Sound Thinking and Sonic Practice.
The CHR warmly congratulates recipients of the 2022 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards, namely Vanessa Chen, Min’enhle Ncube and Suzana Sousa.
The CHR encourages the call for papers for the Transience and the image workshop to be convened from th1 19-20 August 2022 at the Centre for Humanities Research.
We are pleased to share that the University of the Western Cape is offering four doctoral fellowships based at the Centre for Humanities Research to commence in 2022.
The CHR is excited to share the DSI and NRF call for new applications for Postgraduate Student Funding in 2022.
Professor Patricia Hayes of the CHR will be in conversation with Professor Tamar Garb of UCL about Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History
The African Critical Inquiry Programme invites proposals from scholars and/or practitioners in public cultural institutions in South Africa to organise a workshop to take place in 2022.
The SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory underwent its first-phase review in 2020 and has been awarded a second phase of funding for 2021-5 by the National Research Foundation (NRF).
Edited by Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley
Published by Ohio University Press, 2019
Nsima Udo, CHR Doctoral Fellow with the SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory wins prestigious Africa Thesis Award from the African Studies Centre of the University of Leiden in The Netherlands.
From 4 – 6 October, the International Workshop in Visual History and Theory will convene around the theme Other Lives of the Image.
Call for papers: International Workshop in Visual History & Theory
