Acclaimed author to spend a week at UCT

Professor Jacqueline Rose, a renowned scholar of the intersection of feminism, psychoanalysis, literature and politics, will spend a week at UCT this month, culminating in her delivering the Vice-Chancellor's Open Lecture on 16 March.

Rose is Professor of Humanities and co-director for the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London.

A regular contributor to the Guardian and the London Review of Books, she is renowned for her own suite of books. This includes her 2005 tribute to anti-colonial theorist Edward Said, The Question of Zion, which offers a reading of the psychic terrain of Zionism. The book generated heated debates about the Palestine–Israel conflict and is part of a series that Rose wrote on the topic, which includes The Last Resistance (2007) and Proust Among the Nations – from Dreyfus to the Middle East (2011).

Her open lecture is titled “The Legacy, or, What I Have Learned From You”, and Dr Victoria Collis-Buthelezi of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research will respond to the lecture.

Besides the open lecture, Rose will take part in three other events at UCT.

A seminar held in collaboration with the Trans Collective called “Who do you think you are?” is first up on 13 March. A seminar conversation with dean of law Professor Penelope Andrews titled “Sex and Race in the New Millenium: reflections in the aftermath of the Oscar Pistorius murder trial” follows on 14 March.

Rose is no stranger to the Oscar Pistorius trial, having delivered her inaugural lecture at Birkbeck in 2015 on the issue. She has also written about a range of other South African topics, including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the work of Bessie Head and Nadine Gordimer.

Finally, Rose will engage in an open question-and-answer session on the VC's Open Lecture on 17 March, with Dr Victoria Collis-Buthelezi facilitating the discussion.

Story Yusuf Omar. Photo Supplied.