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UCT RESEARCH REPORT 2012
DST/NRF SARChI Chairs
associated with this theme
Archive and Public Culture
Professor Carolyn Hamilton holds the DST/NRF Chair
in Archive and Public Culture, and leads the inter-
disciplinary research initiative in Archive and Public
Culture based at the School of African and Gender
Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics. Professor
Hamilton was previously head of the Constitution
of Public Intellectual Life Project and director of the
Graduate School for the Humanities at the University
of the Witwatersrand. She was also a member of
the Board of the South African History Archive and
founder member of the Gay and Lesbian Archive. Her
archive work is rooted in an ongoing interest in the
history of South Africa in the eras immediately before
colonialism for which there are limited written archives.
Other illuminating materials will need to be explored.
Professor Hamilton was responsible, in partnership with
the Nelson Mandela Foundation, for the establishment
of the Archival Platform
–
an electronic civil-society-
based intervention in the politics of archive.
Migration, Language and
Social Change
Rajend Mesthrie is Professor of Linguistics in the
School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology
and Linguistics, and holds the DST/NRF Chair in
Migration, Language and Social Change. He is a past
president of the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa
(2001 to 2009) and head of the Linguistics Section
at UCT (1998 to 2009). He was elected honorary
life executive member of the Linguistics Society
of Southern Africa in 2012. He is currently an
executive member of the International Society for
English Linguistics and an elected member of the
SA Academy of Science. Professor Mesthrie has
published widely in the field of sociolinguistics,
with special reference to language contact and
variation in South Africa. He is co-editor of the
Cambridge University Press journal
English Today,
which produces scholarship dealing mostly with
English in global and migratory contexts. He is a
board member of another 12 journals in the fields
of sociolinguistics, globalisation and English, South
African sociolinguistics, sociology, and African
studies, and holds an A rating from the NRF.
Islam, African Publics and
Religious Values
Abdulkader Tayob is Professor of Islamic Studies,
Head of the Department of Religious Studies and
holds the DST/NRF Chair in Islam, African Publics and
Religious Values. He obtained his doctoral degree
in 1989 from Temple University in the United States.
Professor Tayob is a recognised scholar in the study
of modern Islam in general, and Islam in South Africa
and Africa in particular. His current research spans
religion education in South Africa, modern Islam, and
biographies of religious engagement. By pursuing
these interests, he examines the way religion is taught
in public life. Building on the work of Islam in public life,
he will examine the role of religion studies as part of
life orientation and religious studies as a free-standing
subject in South African schools. He will continue his
cutting-edge research into how to approach the study
of Islam in the modern world, with the main area of
Professor Carolyn Hamilton
Professor Rajend Mesthrie
Professor Rajend Mesthrie with students at the
annual linguistics workshop.