The prestigious appointment is a fitting recognition of the stellar work of the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at UWC and Professor Lalu’s recent B1 rating by the National Research Foundation.
The award of the Chair affirms the CHR’s standing as a leading research centre in the Humanities and consolidates UWC’s national and international commitments to humanistic study in transcending the legacies of apartheid. With the UK-SA Chair in Digital Humanities, UWC through its Centre for Humanities Research is invited to lead a new study on the mutual imbrication of the humanities and technology, as the digital rescripts their co-constitution and alters conditions of sense-perception structuring contemporary lived experience.
Emerging from established research platforms on the Becoming Technical of the Human, Communicating the Humanities, Aesthetic Education, and New Ecologies of the Subject, and sustained through ongoing inquiries on the encounter between archives, art, and digital mediation, the CHR is uniquely placed to host a Chair in the Digital Humanities. The Chair will provide an overarching intellectual framework for the work of the CHR in its newly established Iyatsiba Lab in Woodstock.
The panel of international reviewers highly recommended the award to Professor Lalu based on his outstanding reputation as a scholar and researcher, his vast experience in mentoring doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, and his record of international publications, including his recent monograph, Undoing Apartheid, published by Polity Press in the UK.