Shamil Jeppie takes on HUMA directorship

My predecessor, Deborah Posel, brought an outstanding record of intellectual and organizational leadership in the humanities to UCT. I can only laud with superlatives her achievements at Huma and the university. I wish to continue to pursue the directions she plotted out for Huma.

We are an institute to foster and enhance humanities research and teaching, always conscious of our location in Africa.  Our responsibility is to create conditions for critical thought and solid research that reflect our engagements with the varieties of experiences on the continent – from Tangiers and Alexandria down to Cape Town, from Goree across to Djibouti, including the islands!  We have obligations to foster deep reading in and across disciplines, to keep our national, continental and global contexts in perspective, and to contribute to a new generation of humanistic scholarship and scholars.

We are a small, energetic group of full-time fellows and we rely on the participation of our colleagues across the university, the region, country and the continent and beyond.  We shall continue to try to balance our own, individual research and writing with a huge curiosity to learn and explore new theoretical and empirical territories.  Our two themes – on being human, and circuits of consumption – are meant to frame our collective effort and not exhaust it.

To see more about the work we do, watch the Huma short film here