The English Literary Studies department continues to foster a vibrant intellectual environment through its ongoing research seminar series, convened by this semester Sindiswa Busuku. So far this year, the department has hosted a range of thought-provoking sessions featuring staff, postgraduate researchers and guest scholars. Topics have spanned contemporary literary theory, life writing and African diasporic intellectual history. These themes came to life through a series of rich and engaging presentations.

Professor Philip Kitcher (Columbia University) offered a philosophical reading of Ulysses in his seminar titled “Joyce’s Perspectivism”, examining how narrative perspective in modernist fiction can illuminate the structures of experience, perception, and self-deception.

Associate Professor Barbara Boswell (University of Cape Town) presented “What It Feels Like To Take Flight: A Black Woman Travelling in the Apartheid Age”, drawing from a personal matrilineal archive to explore mobility, family memory, life writing and epistemology during apartheid.

In “Poetics of Possibility”, Dr Uhuru Phalafala (Stellenbosch University) shared insights from her book Keorapetse Kgotsile and the Black Arts Movement. In conversation with Sindile Bongela and Bokang Mohlabeng, Dr Phalafala explored themes of Black radicalism, kinship, land and insurgent aesthetics, engaging with African diasporic intellectual history, jazz studies and indigenous epistemologies.

These seminars reflect the department’s continued commitment to fostering critical dialogue, interdisciplinary enquiry and a creative reimagining of literary studies.