DSTI-NRF Call for Application Endorsements: UK-SA Bilateral Chair in the Digital Humanities and SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory.
The Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) invites applications from candidates seeking grantholder endorsement for DSTI-NRF Master’s and Doctoral Student Funding for the academic year 2026. Successful applicants will work alongside a team of leading researchers at the CHR under either the UK-SA Bilateral Chair in the Digital Humanities or the SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory.
Successful DSTI-NRF applicants will be awarded residential fellowships at the CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab, a dedicated humanities facility of the University of the Western Cape in Woodstock, Cape Town. The lab offers a supportive environment for focused study and collaborative research. It hosts an expansive network of local and international researchers. The awards are conceived to enable postgraduate students to enter the space of digital humanities or visual history and theory with a view of developing expertise in the field while shaping an inquiry across the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences.
Awardees will become fellows of the CHR linked to the Chair in Digital Humanities or the Chair in Visual History and Theory. Fellows are required to participate in an advanced studies seminar, the CHR’s annual Winter School, the Humanities in Session research seminar, reading groups and publication workshops.
About the Chairs
The UK-SA Bilateral Digital humanities chair in culture and technics, held by Professor Premesh Lalu in the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR), convenes an international study network that traces how the exercise of power relates to the co-evolution of the human and technology. Specifically, the chair is interested to understand the consequences of technology on culture. To this end, our study is focused on how humanistic discourse and arts practices mediates understandings of the expansion in technological resources in the scientific revolutions from the nineteenth century to the present. The chair invites graduate students, faculty, and artists in residence at the CHR and UWC more broadly an inquiry of the cultural effects of scientific revolutions in thermodynamics, psychotechnics/psychophysics, and cybernetics, and their consequences for debates about techno-feudalism, partition and difference, ecology and environmentality, biopolitics, life philosophy, magical realism, and science fiction amongst others.
The SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory, held by Professor Patricia Hayes in the Centre for Humanities Research, is a research platform 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.