Justin Brown - MA
I am an MA student in the Linguistics Section. My thesis is a Socio-phonetic study of English spoken in Cape Town by people previously classified as 'Coloured'. The study forms part of a larger project on the Social Dialectology of English in South Africa being supervised by Prof Rajend Mesthrie. My own work focuses on the link between speech and identity with a particular focus on accents. The study is broadly sociolinguistic, but I employ theories from various disciplines including History and Sociology.
Sue Buchanan - PhD
The Diversity of Life and the Singularity of Literature: Natural History in the Cape
The conjunction of science and literature and the impact of Charles Darwin on South African writing are areas of relative silence in South African literary scholarship. This thesis fills this gap. The starting point is Gillian Beer’s research on the literary and linguistic qualities inherent in scientific texts and particularly in Darwin’s extensive writings. The South African texts selected for analysis and interpretation extend from mid- seventeenth century to the 21st century and are divided into three categories: six pre-Darwinian travelogues written by scientific visitors to the Cape from 1668 – 1812; editorials, essays, reviews and articles published in the Cape Monthly Magazine after Darwin’s publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 and contemporary landmark writers including Olive Schreiner and Ingrid Winterbach. A multifocal theoretical perspective directs the study – the principal participants include Gillian Beer, George Levine, Hayden White, Derek Attridge, Michel Foucault, Joseph Carrol and Edward O. Wilson. The thesis traces the representation of natural history and ‘knowledge building’ within the context of current scientific philosophies, evaluates divergent theoretical approaches, and argues that natural history concepts, contexts and controversies are effectively approached from Beer’s literary, linguistic and narrative perspective.
Megan Cawood - PhD
I came to UCT to do a MA in Literature, Language and Modernity and after receiving such stimulating and challenging supervision from Carrol Clarkson, decided to stay on to do my PhD in Trauma Fiction, with a particular focus on the fiction of Anne Michaels, W.G. Sebald and Bernhard Schlink. The working title of my dissertation is Passing On: ‘The Weight of Memory’ and the Second Generation Fiction of Anne Michaels, W.G. Sebald and Bernhard Schlink.
As I did my undergraduate degree in Canada, I have found UCT a great place to begin to broaden my exposure to South African literature and I have enjoyed finding resonances between my primary research interest and that of post-apartheid literature. Since being at UCT, I have become interested in the literature of forced removals in Cape Town and have had the opportunity to teach a seminar course on this topic.
The department’s postgraduate community has become increasingly vibrant each year that I have been at UCT. I have been inspired through my involvement in our postgraduate colloquiums, conferences, reading groups and weekly seminars and have been grateful for the personal experience that I have gained through both organizing and being a part of these events.
Alida Chevalier - MA
I was born in Pretoria, and moved to Cape Town at the age of four. I am a mother tongue Afrikaans speaker and learnt to speak English during my first year living in Cape Town. Since then I have always been intrigued by language, which is something we all have and use daily. Linguistics is fascinating in that it teaches you so much about what language is and how it works. I am currently a Masters student, working on a socio-phonetic study of South African Indian English. I tutor and lecture in the section, and I also assist Prof Mesthrie in his research.
Alex Dodd - PhD
Alexandra Dodd is an independent writer and a PhD fellow in English Literature with the Archive and Public Culture research initiative at the University of Cape Town. Her core area of research is the Victorian Postmodern in Contemporary South African Art and Literature. She holds an Honours degree in Journalism from Rhodes University and a Masters in English Literature from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
In addition to writing regular articles for magazines, newspapers and websites, Alexandra has worked as editor of Friday for the Mail & Guardian, and books and features editor of ThisDay newspaper, as well as lecturing in creative writing at the University of the Witwatersrand, editing six novels, and acting as a judge in the EU Literary Awards and the Mondi Awards. She has contributed essays to several books, including David Goldblatt: Photographs, published in Europe by Contrasto and The Fire Walker (in response to a public sculpture by William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx) published by Fourthwall Books.
Lulu Mfazwe-Mojapelo - PhD
Lulu’s an accredited member of the South African Translators’ Institute (SATI). She has worked as a Speechwriter for the Minister & Deputy Minister of the Department of Communications and a Language Advisor, Editor & Translator for different Government Departments and Publishers. She’s also a co-author of a book, Learners with Special Needs, 1998, by Heinemann Publishers (Pty)
Sarifa Moola is a PhD Candidate conducting research on ‘Language Maintenance and Shift in an immigrant African community of KwaZulu-Natal: The Zanzibaris of Durban?’ The research examines the language situation among the Zanzibari community of Durban within the framework of previous theories of language shift and maintenance. Various research techniques were employed to collect data: interviews, surveys, participant observation and data sources like documents, documentaries, reports and personal impressions and reactions when conducting the research.
Kirsten Morreira was born in Durban, South Africa, but grew up in Harare, Zimbabwe. She came to UCT as an undergraduate in 2000. She is currently working on a PhD in the department on the attitudes and speech of new black middle class youth at UCT, examining the so-called ‘Model C’ accents in South African English
Emma O’Shaugnessy - PhD
In 2005, after number of years designing sets in the film industry, I started to feel a tug towards a more critical engagement with the world and its imaginations. I decided to continue where I had left off at UCT, and enrolled in the Honours Programme in the English Department. Before I knew it, I found myself gliding into the taught Masters Programme. The transition from here to the doctoral programme was equally fluid, facilitated by excellent professors with wide research interests.
My own research is trans-disciplinary and I have always found myself to be well supported in this. With the immense open-mindedness of Professor Harry Garuba in the Centre for African Studies, who has a joint seat in this department, and the intellectual powerhouse that is the present head of English, Associate Professor Carrol Clarkson, I have been given the freedom to find interesting and original inroads into my literary delving – roads that stretch into politics, human geography and cultural studies.
Aside from this, I am the managing editor of postamble, a postgraduate journal in the Centre for African Studies, and am involved in several reading groups and support meetings organised through the department, all of which make the PhD experience meaningful – beyond the page. I have been encouraged to teach at every turn, and am currently running two seminars. The department launched the first Conference of the Humanities last year and this year, I am on my way to my first international conference. At the PhD level, being financially well supported makes all of this possible – and there are several scholarships in place directed at English and the Humanities. Above all, studying here has also allowed me to find a situatedness in my work and has given me access to localised knowledge systems and narratives– the strength and nuances of which are so often inaccessible from afar.
Kelly Quantrill
Rhodes ‘09, triple major BA in Classical Civilisation, English Literature, and Linguistics. I am interested in phonetics and the worlds of publishing and advertising. I am an amateur astronomer, secular humanist, active atheist, book collector, book worm, pizza lover, and sushi junkie. I have spent the last four years heavily involved in community outreach programs. Twitter is my new favourite social networking site and I have two blog sites, each with their own theme. I am very interested in current affairs, archaeology, space and religion.
Dr Donald Powers
I completed my BA, Honours, and MA degrees in English literature at the University of Cape Town. Since 2004 I've taught in various undergraduate courses in the UCT English Department, offering seminars on J.M. Coetzee, some of Coetzee's intertexts (Defoe, Nabokov, Beckett), William Faulkner, and selected English novels of the nineteenth century. My research interests include the work of Coetzee, W.G. Sebald, and Cormac McCarthy. With Carrol Clarkson in 2006 I co-founded the Coetzee Collective (see www.coetzeecollective.net), which continues to thrive in the UCT English Department; and with Eckard Smuts I recently initiated a Coetzee Collective reading group.I completed my doctoral thesis on Coetzee's late fiction.
Eckard Smuts – PhD
After completing my MA at Stellenbosch and spending a semester at the University of Texas at Austin, I considered going abroad for my PhD, but in the end I opted for UCT, a great decision. The English Department attracts accomplished and enthusiastic scholars from all over the world and the lively postgraduate environment is characterized by a free exchange of ideas between students and academic staff.
Cape Town itself is host to various cultural and literary events. The Book Lounge is a particular favourite, with a full weekly roster of readings, book launches and topical discussions. The city has an easygoing, cosmopolitan feel to it, which seems, to my mind, like the ideal sort of place to pursue academic study. I heartily recommend UCT to all prospective postgraduate students – they won’t regret it.
Karlien van der Schyff - PhD
My PhD thesis explores gendered portrayals of the black female body in post-apartheid South African literature, art and popular media, interrogating the various discourses through which stereotypes of race and gender are propagated. It argues that colonising practices are not necessarily exclusive to the colonial context and that, while post-apartheid South Africa is no longer a colonial power, it is still a colonising nation, especially in terms of the construction of gender identities and gendered representations of bodies.
Unequal gendered power relations remain highly problematic in contemporary South Africa. In a country where young black women have, in recent years, been killed for daring to subvert dominant perceptions of gender norms or where young black women are brutally attacked simply because they choose to wear a miniskirt, studies and research on gendered power relations are absolutely crucial to a more liberatory South African gender politics. The types of representation of the female body discussed throughout my thesis obviously attempt to normalise gender stereotypes, instead of initiating discussions about what constitutes gender in South Africa in the first place. This study aims to address this problem through its theoretical framework, focusing on both Judith Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender and on a feminist ethics of embodiment. Ultimately, this study argues that, in terms of the construction of gender identities and gendered representations of bodies, contemporary South African literature, art and popular media reiterate damaging stereotypes of race and gender, and that gender is still a colonised site of oppression, even in the postcolony.
Simon van Schalkwyk - PhD
I completed my BA and Honours degrees in English Literature at UCT, and my MA in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. I worked as a junior assistant lecturer in UCT’s Department of English Language and Literature for two years after my return to Cape Town. During this time I conducted tutorials, lectured occasionally, and offered seminars in local and metropolitan literature and poetry. I am currently completing my Doctoral thesis on the poetic imitations of the mid-C20th American poet, Robert Lowell