The CHR will be screening Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat by Johan Grimonprez on Wednesday 30 October, followed by a roundtable discussion

The CHR is delighted to announce that Sound Working Group Convenors, Aidan Erasmus, Valmont Layne and Lee Walters have received a joint Creative Arts Output Award for their outstanding contributions to Research and Innovation at the University of the Western Cape.

To explore the concept of partition in the context of AI and the humanities, and with an eye towards potential cross-national collaboration on developing research and curriculum, Dr Valmont Layne co-hosted two workshops with Professor Jennifer Keating, Teaching Writing in the Disciplines Specialist at the William S. Dietrich II Institute for Writing Excellence, University of Pittsburgh.

Critical listening is the first step toward an ethics and aesthetics of care and freedom. Discarding listening habits and accepting new sound qualities afford access to other layers of history and experience.

We are pleased to announce the publication of Kronos: Southern African Histories under the theme of Oral/Aural: Pastness and Sound as Medium and Method, edited by Dr Valmont Layne, CHR, and Dr Aidan Erasmus, Department of Historical Studies, UWC.

This year’s African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) Workshop, titled ‘Archiving Otherwise: Sound thinking and Sonic Practice’, brought together CHR staff and fellows, UWC faculty members and students, ACIP fellows, and sonic practitioners for a three-day workshop in early April.

The African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) is pleased to announce that the 2023 ACIP Workshop will be Archiving Otherwise: Sound Thinking and Sonic Practice.

Founding CHR director and filmmaker Premesh Lalu will be in conversation with Rashid Lombard, Jayson King, Sylvia Mndunyelwa and Dinga Sikwebu about his new film The Double Futures of Athlone at the Encounters South African Documentary International Film Festival. The panel will be moderated by Valmont Layne.

Next Generation Scholar Valmont Layne examines the challenges and possibilities of music archives in Southern Africa.

Prof. Patricia Hayes and Dr Valmont Layne investigate how UWC can revitalise its archival holdings for preservation, teaching, research access, and public programmes.

The CHR’s Flagship fellowship programme for early career scholars is at the heart of a deep commitment to transforming higher education at the doctoral level in South Africa.

Contributions by Staff and Fellows of the Centre for Humanities Research to edited volumes represent a diverse engagement with the centre’s academic inquiries. The following list shows publications from the latter years of the centre’s output.

The South African Contemporary History and Humanities Seminar is pleased to announce that Kim Gurney will be presenting “Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive” on 22 June 2021 at 14:00.

South Africa’s lost jazz history contains many an overlooked classic. But even within that hidden tradition, there are few albums that suffered such an unlucky fate as Spring, the monumental 1968 debut album by pianist Ibrahim Khalil Shihab, formerly Chris Schilder. 

Dr Valmont Layne, Next-Generation Scholar at the Centre for Humanities Research NRF Flagship, recently participated in a podcast for National Public Radio in the USA.

A Winter School webinar with Associate Professor Heidi Grunebaum

As part of the Communicating the Humanities project at the Centre for Humanities Research, Next Generation Scholar, Valmont Layne, will be in conversation with Steve Akoth, Christine van Zyl and The Letter’s co-directors Maia Lekow and Christopher King.

Exodus, Movement, a/the People: Critical Thinking and the Collective

The CHR congratulations to Valmont Layne for graduating with his doctorate, with a thesis that focuses on the history of Goema music in Cape Town and its intricate links to Cape Jazz.

Between July 6th and July 10th 2019, the Laboratory of Kinetic Objects (LoKO) at the CHR hosted a colloquium on Subject/Object relations, in an ongoing exploration of Animation, Animism, Thing Theory, the Subject and the Object, Puppetry Arts and performance.

The Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI) Africa Workshop 2019 was hosted in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with scholars from the CHR attending.

Tem Hawker, Yakhal Inkomo and the sentimental ‘avant-garde: Revisiting Cape jazz’s sonic archive’