Cynthia Kros

I was appointed Honorary Research Associate to the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative in April 2019. I spent many years in the History Department at Wits University, for a long stretch being the only woman in the department. I was invited in 2007 by the Head of the School of Arts, also at Wits to develop a division within the School known as Arts, Culture and Heritage Management. Among other things, this afforded me a wonderful opportunity to explore my main interest within a creative and enabling environment, which concerns all the varied ways that history is represented, mobilised and re-created. In my published work, I have ranged over life-history writing, questions related to memorialisation, different iterations of the school social sciences/history curriculum, and more recently concepts of the Archive. I have retained an association with the Wits History Workshop of which I have been a member since the early 1990s.While I have been associated with the APC, which is also an enormously creative, stimulating and creative environment, I have also had the great pleasure of being involved with the delivery of a new MA course in Historical Studies at UCT, titled ‘History in Public Life’.I have published many articles in history, education and heritage journals. My book, based on my PhD thesis (Wits 1997) The Seeds of Separate Development: Origins of Bantu Education was published in 2010. Over the last half dozen years or so I have been involved in editing a collection of essays along with John Wright, Mbongiseni Buthelezi and Helen Ludlow. The manuscript is about to go into production with Wits Press under the title: Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa’s Deep History.