Visual History & Theory is a research platform at the University of the Western Cape that promotes a critical engagement with the image in relation to other forms of knowledge production, creativity and contest in Africa and elsewhere.

The Andrew W Mellon Chair Aesthetic Theory and Material Performance holds together several interdisciplinary modes of enquiry.

The 2024 Visual History and Theory Workshop will take place on 19-20 September at the CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab.

This year’s Visual History and Theory Workshop Keynote will be delivered by Christopher Morton, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

Abstracts are invited for participation in the annual workshop in Visual History & Theory to be held at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, on 19-20 September 2024.

This year’s NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory Workshop will take place between 27-28 July. It coalesces around the title, ‘Power: Remaking selves, archives, environments’, and will include a keynote by Leigh Raiford who is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

Visual History & Theory Workshop 27-28 July 2023 Call for Papers

The DSI and NRF are pleased to announce a call for new applications for DSI-NRF Postgraduate Student Funding for the academic year 2024. All continuing students who are eligible for a second or third year of funding must submit a Progress Report and not a new application.

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.

Workshop in Visual History & Theory 2022

Premesh Lalu’s documentary film, The Double Future’s of Athlone, which was sold out at the Encounters documentary film festival in Cape Town and Johannesburg, will be screened online at the Durban International Film Festival from July 21-30, 2022.

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

The CHR warmly congratulates recipients of the 2022 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards, namely Vanessa Chen, Min’enhle Ncube and Suzana Sousa.

The CHR encourages the call for papers for the Transience and the image workshop to be convened from th1 19-20 August 2022 at the Centre for Humanities Research.

We are pleased to share that the University of the Western Cape is offering four doctoral fellowships based at the Centre for Humanities Research to commence in 2022.

With 2021 being declared “The Year of Charlotte Maxeke,” the DSI-NRF Flagship on Critical thought in the African Humanities at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, has embarked on a special production based on the life of Maxeke.

With construction underway on Greatmore, a sod-turning ceremony was held to celebrate the coming to fruition of the proposal for an arts and humanities hub supported through the DSI-NRF Flagship and the NIHSS.

The CHR is excited to share the DSI and NRF call for new applications for Postgraduate Student Funding in 2022.

Professor Patricia Hayes of the CHR will be in conversation with Professor Tamar Garb of UCL about Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History

Inviting Artists and Scholars to Reimagine the Future of the Humanities Beyond the Divided City.

The African Critical Inquiry Programme invites proposals from scholars and/or practitioners in public cultural institutions in South Africa to organise a workshop to take place in 2022.

The SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory underwent its first-phase review in 2020 and has been awarded a second phase of funding for 2021-5 by the National Research Foundation (NRF).

Edited by Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley
Published by Ohio University Press, 2019

A Winter School webinar with Associate Professor Heidi Grunebaum

A Winter School webinar with Associate Professor Nancy Luxon

A Winter School webinar with Professor Rinaldo Walcott

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

A conference hosted by the CHR from 17 – 18 December 2019 will explore the relationship between the genealogy, the concept and the practice of democracy.

Nsima Udo, CHR Doctoral Fellow with the SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory wins prestigious Africa Thesis Award from the African Studies Centre of the University of Leiden in The Netherlands.

From 4 – 6 October, the International Workshop in Visual History and Theory will convene around the theme Other Lives of the Image.

Call for papers: International Workshop in Visual History & Theory

International Workshop on Visual History & Theory