Aidan Erasmus

DSI-NRF Early Career Doctoral Fellow

Dr. Aidan Erasmus is based in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape. His research encompasses the comparative histories of race, technology, and sense, with a special interest in sound.

He has presented and published on topics relating to sound, technology, music, and memory, and organized workshops and conferences on these and other related areas of inquiry. Dr Aidan Erasmus completed his doctoral studies as a DSI-NRF Early Career Doctoral Fellow at the CHR before becoming a Next Generation Scholar at the centre. In his doctoral dissertation, Dr Erasmus invested in constituting sound as a modality through which to think the resonant contours of imperial war, through the examination of aesthetic production in music, radio and cinema under apartheid and the contemporary moment. In 2023, he co-edited a special issue of Kronos: Southern African Histories on the question of sound and historical method with Dr. Valmont Layne under the theme “Oral/Aural: Pastness and Sound as Medium and Method”. He is currently engaged in a book project on the question of sound and sense in the intellectual life of Solomon Plaatje, an early twentieth-century African intellectual. provisionally titled An Anticolonial Sense: Sol Plaatje, Sonic Repertoires, and the Making of a World to Come. He also co-convenes the Sound Working Group at the Iyatsiba Lab at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, and through this work, has been involved in OSCILLATIONS: Sonic Inquiries and Practices, a successful sound art residency and exhibition project between Cape Town and Berlin submitted to the German Federal Cultural Foundation TURN2 Fund in partnership with Akademie Der Künste, Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, and Deutschlandfunk Kultur/Klangkunst. He has also participated in several collaborative research groups such as the Forensic History Group at the University of the Western Cape, The (in)Audible Past research project convened by the University of Fort Hare and the University of Basel, and several other collaborative projects with local and international scholars and artists. As a lecturer, he teaches courses in African history and historiography, including a senior undergraduate course titled ‘Making Sense: Sight, Sound, Technology, and Race in African History’ that inducts students into both research and practice-based explorations of the history of sight and sound reproduction technologies in Africa.