Postgrad conference rolls on

Current events: Collen Sabao (Stellenbosch), Silina Mudavanhu (UCT), Ivy Shutu-Musekiwa (UCT) and Andrew Phillips (UCT) lead a session at the recent humanities conference.

UCT and Stellenbosch students showcased their work at the 2011 Postgraduate Conference for Current Research in the Humanities, hosted by the Department of English Language and Literature with the journal Postamble.

The gathering started as a smaller, shorter meeting and just one Stellenbosch student, explains Megan Cawood, one of the organisers. This year, in the conference's third year, seven students from Stellenbosch took part, and some of their supervisors attended as well.

"The aim of the event is to create a space for postgraduates from across the disciplines within the humanities to present their research," says Cawood. "This is why there is no specific conference theme each year, but rather the call for papers is very broad and I try to find links between paper proposals and structure the sessions accordingly."

Topics covered everything from 'Indianness' in three South African novels and the construction of masculinity in rape, to corporal punishment in a working class school and biological bias.