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NEW FACES
by Softcopy
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Tarryn holds a Master’s degree in Social Science (Psychology) summa cum laude from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and is completing her PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam as a part of the Desmond Tutu NRF Doctoral scholarship.
Tarryn’s research focuses on memory and identity in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on material from her psychology background and interests in anthropology, history, development studies as well as literary, culture and media studies, her PhD project explores questions of how South African youth (the ‘born-free generation’) understand and ‘remember’ our traumatic past and create our future. Additionally, her research has engaged with issues of cross-generational story-telling, and during her Master’s study, she participated in a SANPAD-funded project under the umbrella: ‘Exploring cross-generational construction of social identities in contemporary South Africa: notes from emergent margins’ that was held at the Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity (CCRRI) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Bulelwa Mbele Fine Art and Jewellery Design and Manufacture Department
Bulelwa Mbele is currently a Fine Art Lecturer at the Durban University of Technology. She was previously a Junior Lecturer in Art History at the University of South Africa. She has worked in various art institutions such as the “Bag Factory Artists’ Studios” and “Gallery Momo”. She completed her Master’s degree in History of Art at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2019 and her BAFA at the same university in 2010. Her research is largely based on sexual violence and the manner that it intersects with visual culture.
Nontsasa is a senior lecturer in Media, Language and Communication. Her research focuses on black women as producers of knowledge about their lived realities. She has published book chapters and journal articles on race, gender, sexuality and culture, touching on varied subjects such as women before the TRC, disability, gender and race, and black women in popular culture and the historical archive. Her current project focuses on representation of Black women in South African heritage and commemoration.
Jade Smith (PhD)
Jade is a sociolinguist with an eye on the underlying meaning in texts. She started her studies at Rhodes University with the aim of becoming a journalist. However, after a BA in Journalism and Media Studies specialising in writing and editing, her interest in critical discourse analysis led her to pursue a newfound love: linguistics. Still intrigued by print media, Jade focused her MA research on the ways in which imagined communities of readership are built in letters to the editors of the Daily Sun and The Times newspapers. Her findings have been published in local and international linguistics journals. Jade has also published in health journalism as a research assistant at the Discovery Centre for Health Journalism. After a brief detour from academia as a high school English teacher and TVET lecturer in business communication, Jade started her PhD in linguistics through Rhodes University. Her research investigated the representations of South Africans in the words and images of post-apartheid children’s literature with a multimodal systemic functional linguistic framework. After completing her PhD, Jade was an online writing tutor for university students from the USA, Canada and Australia. Her current research project is a multimodal analysis of a children’s book parody which builds an imagined community of support among tired parents.
Ntokozo Xulu Faculty of Arts and Design: DUT Art Gallery
Ntokozo holds a Bachelor of Technology in Fine Art and a National Diploma in Fine Art, both from the Durban University of Technology. He has previously worked for the Department of Arts and Culture (Northern Region) during 201718 as part of an internship. In 2019, he worked for the DUT Art Gallery as a Laboratory Assistant on a part-time basis and later joined as a permanent member of staff. As an emerging artist, he is interested in practice-based research in fine art.
Ursula studied Literature and Fine Art at UKZN (then the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg) and completed her Master of Arts in Cultural and Critical Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her primary research interest is in the adaptation of texts. This long-standing interest has been pursued through her published research, her PhD studies at UKZN, and her own creative projects, which include graphic novel and screenplay adaptations. Prior to taking up her current role, she undertook both teaching and project management roles at DUT, as well as lecturing and supervising Honours film students at AFDA Durban. Before entering academia, Ursula worked for more than a decade in corporate communications, primarily as Internal Communications Manager for Newham Council and City of London Corporation.
R.I.P Dr Joseph Shabalala 1940-2020
