APPLICANT CALL: SHORT-TERM DIGITAL HUMANITIES FELLOW 2023

The Reimagining Tragedy from Africa and the Global South (ReTAGS) project, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is an innovative five-year research project that began in 2019. This project takes the concept of tragedy from the very beginnings of theatre in its European manifestation and reimagines its performance from an African perspective, both inside and outside formal theatre traditions. Our research considers theatrical performances, political spectacle and protest as a reaction to the complex challenges of our global postcolonial present and the concept of ‘the tragic’. 

Now in its final year, the ReTAGS research team seeks to award a short-term Digital Humanities Fellowship to re-engage and reimagine the project’s archival material and produce a digital output for our online project platform. The call is open to South African citizens. We particularly encourage applicants who are female-identifying and/or of colour. 

The ReTAGS digital repository (built on Omeka S) seeks to utilise current best practice to bring creative and critical perspectives on Tragedy in the Global South into the digital environment. The online platform holds varied forms of research material emerging from the project and is envisaged as an exciting meeting point between an archive and an exhibition. Currently, the digital repository hosts photographic stills and thousands of hours of catalogued rehearsal footage from our three Practice as Research productions, oral history interviews with artists and activists, and public presentations. 

We seek to work with a digitally savvy academic/creative/researcher who can bring these archival research materials to life. We therefore invite proposals for a creative digital fellowship, with an aim to produce an engaging digital output explicitly working with the ReTAGS archival material, that adds value to the ReTAGS online platform. 

Working in the first instance alongside our digital archivist, Jayne Batzofin, and in consultation with the project research leads as necessary, this short-term fellowship gives the freedom to develop and execute a contained digital project for site exhibition. We encourage proposals that are achievable within a three-month period and that weave together the archival material in intellectually and visually engaging ways. Whether it be developing coding to visualise our data, editing compilation videos bringing together the outputs of our project in a digital exhibition or engaging with AI to propose creative responses to the data, we welcome all out-the-box thinking as we develop our digital footprint. 

The fellowship will ideally commence towards the end of June 2023. 

It carries a remunerative stipend of R50 000, to be paid in tranches as the output develops. 

To apply, complete the following MS Teams Form by 31 May 2023. 

If you have any queries, contact our Digital Archivist, Jayne Batzofin, at jayne.batzofin@uct.ac.za