Fernanda Pinto De Almeida

Fellow: DSI-NRF Early Career Doctoral Fellow, Postdoctoral

Dr Fernanda Pinto de Almeida was a DSI-NRF Early Career Doctoral Fellow at the CHR before taking up her current position as a postdoctoral fellow. Dr Fernanda Pinto de Almeida’s doctoral dissertation offered an analysis of the space and infrastructure of cinema houses, or “bioscopes,” in twentieth-century Cape Town. Mapping the historical formations of cinemas from the Union’s control in the 1910s to the end of Apartheid’s Separate Amenities in the late 1980s, the dissertation examined how cinemas promoted a collective form of experience that eschewed both segregationist and liberal policies. Dr de Almeida suggests that cinemas eluded spatial boundaries by attracting audiences across racial lines and redefining public reception of mass media. Showing how cinemas were implicated in Cape Town’s racial geography and the city’s incipient public sphere, she argues that the cinemas represented both racial arrest and a potential for political change. As a DSI-NRF Early Career Fellow, Dr de Almeida was awarded a writing fellowship at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) at the University of Minnesota.