Associate Professor Kurt Campbell is the new Head of Department

We are happy to announce that Kurt Campbell is the new Director of Michaelis. Kurt completed a BAFA and PGCE at UCT before going on to get his MFA from the University of Stellenbosch. He attained his PhD from the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). His recently published monograph – To Write as a Boxer: Disability and Resignification in the Text, A South African Boxer in Britain  (2019) developed from his PhD and positions the writing of the blinded champion South African boxer Andrew Jeptha as an important contribution to Postcolonial and Disability Studies. He has been a visiting scholar to the University of Michigan, a visiting fellow at Harvard University and has been a guest scholar at the University of Cairo. 

Kurt Campbell is a practicing artist and his recent artworks combine sculpture and Augmented Reality to facilitate interactive art experiences. The conceptual frameworks of his visual research often engage the post-apartheid, post-colonial space of aesthetic ideation in South Africa. His curation of the exhibition Athlone in Mind (with accompanying catalogue edited by Heidi Grunebaum) for the Centre for Humanities Research UWC,  led to a him and Dr Grunebaum  sharing the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences award for the Best Exhibition Catalogue 2019. He is also an accomplished writer who has written for many peer reviewed journals. 

We wish him much success over the next three years.