Date: Thursday 31 October 2024
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: The CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab, 66 Greatmore Street, Woodstock, (Entrance on Regent Road).
The Maxeke – Robinson Irish Studies Chair emerges out of a longstanding collaboration between the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at UWC and the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute (TLRH) at Trinity College Dublin that has focused on colonialism, partition, postcoloniality and race. Relationships and networks forged through these institutions’ fellowship programmes have laid the groundwork for today’s historic announcement. The Charlotte Maxeke-Mary Robinson Research Chair inaugurates, through the Humanities, a broader and reciprocal collaboration between Ireland and South Africa which engages our complex inheritance of colonialism, empire, partition and apartheid, and how to overcome this legacy. The CHR and TLRH’s work in aesthetics and politics has drawn attention across our social and institutional settings to the ways that cultural production can bring political thought, the arts, and research across disciplines into the public sphere. This shared understanding stems from a recognition of a history that marks both countries in relation to legacies of colonialism and partition, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the work of education and the arts to find unexplored modes of reconciliation to transcend these legacies.
Margaret Kelleher is Professor and Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. She has published widely in the areas of Irish literary and cultural history, famine studies, modern and contemporary Irish culture, and digital humanities. Margaret is Board Member of the Museum of Literature Ireland (https://moli.ie/) and was academic lead for UCD in the foundation of this landmark public humanities initiative. In 2022 she was a Cullman Centre Fellow at the New York Public Library, and in 2023-4 Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
Ciraj Rassool is Senior Professor of History at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). He has lectured and published widely in a number of areas, including Museum and Heritage Studies, Curatorial Studies, the Politics of Memory, Public History, Political Biography and Liberation Movements. He served on the boards of the District Six Museum and Iziko Museums of South Africa, and on the Councils of the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) and the National Heritage Council. He previously chaired the Scientific Committee of the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM), was a member of the High-Level Museums Advisory Committee of UNESCO.