News Archives - The Centre for Humanities Research

October 22, 2025

Exhibition Opening: Tales of History Retold

For this exhibition, eight artists were invited to select artefacts from the document archive of the Association for Visual Arts (AVA), a not-for-profit gallery and collective in Cape Town, as source material for an artistic response.

October 21, 2025

Artists’s Forum with Kemang Wa Lehulere

The Artists Forum, convened at the Centre for Humanities Research, emerges out a longstanding conversation between artists and academics working in and through the CHR. The Forum’s objective has been to connect scholarly exploration with the CHR’s Artist in Residency programme, and to bring artists and humanistic study into a more intimate adjacency.

October 20, 2025

The Polyrhythmic Ensemble

The Polyrhythmic Ensemble was formed in 2023 with the aim of creating new works based around research into contrapuntal and polyrhythmic African music.

October 20, 2025

Troubling the divide: Jazz, History and the new African

An interview with Lindelwa Dalamba

October 14, 2025

Culture and Technics Workshop: 10-12 November

The UK-SA Chair in Digital Humanities, held by Prof. Premesh Lalu, is welcoming international scholars to Cape Town in November to attend a three-day roundtable at Iyatsiba Lab in Woodstock.

October 14, 2025

Fellowship Announcement: Siyanda Kobokana

We are delighted to announce that SA/UK Digital Humanities PhD fellow, Siyanda Kobokana, has been selected for the inaugural Paris Doctoral Research Residency at IFAS–Fondation Fiminco–ArTeC.

October 10, 2025

An Archive and Forms of Sight: Gestures of Madness

My history of madness in the Belgian Congo will rely on tracking transactional, micro, and urgent documents as gestures. These promise to open “spheres of ethos,” with human riddles, forms of upheaval, and violence (Agamben 1992).

October 10, 2025

In Black Women’s Hands: A History of Gestures in Photography and Textile

Contemporary Black female artists have reclaimed the everyday labor and domestic motions women have historically performed, as artistic gestures in their own right. For example, the ceramic and bronze sculptures of the African-American artist Simone Leigh have referenced vernacular processes like washing chores and needlework.

October 10, 2025

Together Apart The Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement

In April 1964, the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement (IAAM) was launched in Dublin by Kader Asmal, a South-African professor of law in Trinity College. Lobbying for improved human rights and liberation in South Africa, the Movement raised awareness of the racism experienced by communities and campaigned for the release of political prisoners.

October 10, 2025

Book Launch: Drafts in Action

The book launch for Drafts in Action will take place on 13 October 2025 at ESPACE Diaphanes in Berlin.

October 10, 2025

Book Announcement: Undoing Apartheid, by Premesh Lalu, Turkish translation.

We are delighted to announce that Undoing Apartheid by Premesh Lalu has been translated into Turkish and published by Afrika Vakfi Yayinevi. See below for more information about Undoing Apartheid and its Turkish translation, Apartheid’ı Ortadan Kaldırmak.

October 6, 2025

Dublin Short: A Little Approach to Big History

Join us for a screening of Dublin Short a short documentary capturing the magic of the Little Museum of Dublin's famous guided tour. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Dr Daryl Hendley Rooney, deputy curator at the Little Museum and visiting researcher on the Charlotte Maxeke-Mary Robinson Research Chair.