One of HUMA’s strategic goals is to contributing to training the next generation of scholars through doctoral and postdoctoral support and enrichment.
The Institute is deeply invested in creating a centre of intellectual gravity in the South, serving as mechanisms for national, continental and international linkages. The most critical element of the initiative to inspire graduate students and postdocs to consider becoming academics is to make them part of a lively, imaginative and well-connected research community, one that also provides intellectual role models and powerful champions of the intellectual project. HUMA’s principal contribution to the next academic generation is to instantiate a tempting and exciting version of the academy – grounded in all of the Institute’s strategic initiatives.
HUMA coordinates a number of more specific initiatives, directly targeted at doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, early career scholars, and advanced researches seeking opportunities for short research stays, writing, sabbaticals and other exchanges.
The HUMA Doctoral Fellowship Programme
HUMA’s doctoral fellowship programme provides financial and intellectual support for four years of full-time doctoral study to students based in the Institute. HUMA doctoral students are supervised by committees comprising a mix of core academic staff based at the Institute and colleagues in teaching departments at UCT, in collaboration with researchers worldwide. The fellowship offers structured doctoral tuition – departing from the dominant model of doctoral scholarship in South Africa, in an effort to create more supportive doctoral pedagogies.
The HUMA Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme
HUMA’s Postdocs are among the most lively, intellectually curious and productive scholars to have around – and excellent role models and interlocutors for PhD students. HUMA’s postdocs are directed at enriching doctoral study. Postdocs fully participate in the intellectual life and operations of the institute, inducted into the responsibilities and opportunities of academic citizenship, e.g. with assistance in organizing seminars and symposia, writing funding proposals, publishing articles and public engagement.
The HUMA Visiting Fellowship Programme
The visiting professorships, scholars in residence and other associated programmes are intended to create supportive and productive relationships with individuals and institutions elsewhere – with a particular emphasis on appropriate partnerships in other parts of the South. These relationships are critical in advancing many of the Institute’s aims. Visitors are expected to contribute actively to the intellectual life of the Institute, including in supporting doctoral students and postdocs. For aspirant young scholars, the circulation of intellectually engaging visitors through the Institute is critical to the experience of a dynamic, cosmopolitan academy.