UCT inaugural lectures for October 2025

Dear colleagues and students

The University of Cape Town’s (UCT) inaugural lectures are occasions that honour the academic achievements of newly-appointed professors. They give us the opportunity to recognise excellence, share knowledge beyond disciplinary boundaries and strengthen the intellectual life of our university.

Each lecture is both a personal milestone and a public moment of engagement. It allows us to hear how our colleagues have advanced their fields, the questions that guide their research and the ideas that shape their teaching.

Professors Amrita Pande, Suren Pillay and Komala Pillay will present their inaugural lectures in October 2025. All members of the UCT community and alumni, partners and the wider public are invited to attend these events.

As the writer and scholar bell hooks reminded us, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy”. These lectures embody that possibility, a space to rethink, imagine and shape knowledge for the future.

Professor Amrita Pande (Faculty of Humanities)

Professor Amrita Pande will deliver her lecture, “White Eggs, Black Wombs: Staging the Baby Business”, on Wednesday, 15 October 2025 at 18:00 SAST at Auditorium LT1, Neville Alexander Building, on lower campus.

Professor Pande’s lecture will examine how assisted reproductive technologies have transformed reproduction into a global marketplace. She will explore the intimate and embodied forms of labour involved in egg donation and surrogacy, situating these within broader frameworks of global migration, political economy and racial capitalism. Through a combination of lecture and performance, she will reflect on the lives of South African egg providers and Indian and Ghanaian surrogates, asking what these technologies mean for the futures we dare or fear to imagine.

Professor Pande is a professor of Sociology and Fellow at UCT whose research focuses on transnational reproduction, repro-genetic justice and multimodal ethnography. Her book, Wombs in Labor: Transnational Surrogacy in India, has been widely recognised and adapted into a multimedia performance staged worldwide. Her work has been published in leading journals and edited volumes, and she has written for international newspapers while appearing on major media platforms including the BBC, TRT World, Danish National Television, SABC and SAfm.

Over the past two decades, she has conducted a “mobile ethnography” of global fertility clinics in India, Cambodia, Ghana and South Africa. She is completing her next book for MIT Press and continues to combine scholarship with creative expression. She has held visiting fellowships and professorships at Boston University, Brandeis University and the Institut Convergence Migrations in Paris. In 2022, she founded the South African chapter of Women Walk at Midnight to reclaim public spaces for women and bring feminist joy to city nights.

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Professor Suren Pillay (Faculty of Humanities)

Professor Suren Pillay will present his lecture, “The Eye Crosses the River Before the Body: Being and Becoming African in the University”, on Tuesday, 21 October 2025 at 17:30 SAST in the Mafeje Room, Bremner Building on lower campus.

Professor Pillay’s lecture will reflect on the unresolved legacies of colonialism in South Africa and their implications for higher education. He will ask what it means to decolonise universities in a society that has often exceptionalised its experiences rather than placing them within broader African and global contexts. Drawing on two decades of scholarship, he will consider the pitfalls and possibilities of Africanising apartheid universities, and how the humanities and social sciences may reinscribe colonial canons or contribute to new ways of thinking about the world.

Professor Pillay holds the AC Jordan Chair in African Studies and is director of the Centre for African Studies at UCT. His research spans political violence, citizenship and justice, and the politics of knowledge production in postcolonial contexts. His publications include Predicaments of Knowledge, Decolonization and Deracialization in Universities and On the Subject of Citizenship: Late Colonialism in the World Today. He is also the co-editor of Truth vs Justice? The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice in Africa.

He holds an MPhil and PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. He has held visiting positions at Columbia, the City University of New York, Makerere University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Sciences Po. He is a member of the editorial collective of Postcolonial Studies and MISR Review, and serves on the board of the Program for African Social Research. His scholarship reflects a deep commitment to building intellectual networks across the global South while engaging South Africa’s unfinished debates about decolonisation.

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Professor Komala Pillay (Faculty of Health Sciences)

Professor Komala Pillay will present her lecture, “Give the PATH less travelled a chance, it may turn out to be magical”, on Thursday, 30 October 2025 at 18:00 SAST at the New Learning Centre Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building on the health sciences campus.

Professor Pillay’s lecture will explore the journey into anatomical pathology, a discipline often overlooked but essential to medicine. She will reflect on her early experiences as a medical student and the research opportunities that shaped her career path. Her lecture will pay tribute to mentors, colleagues, students and collaborators while highlighting how service delivery has contributed to advances in research and teaching.

Professor Pillay is the Wernher and Beit Chair and head of the Division of Anatomical Pathology at UCT and the National Health Laboratory Services (NHLS), based at Groote Schuur and Red Cross War Memorial Children’s hospitals. She is also the honorary professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at Walter Sisulu University. She holds medical and specialist qualifications from the University of KwaZulu Natal, UCT, the Colleges of Medicine of South Africa and the Royal College of Pathologists in the UK.

Her academic career has integrated clinical service, research, teaching and leadership. She has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications, with research spanning oncology, neuropathology, placental pathology, lymphoma and infectious diseases. She has supervised numerous postgraduate students and played a leading role in adapting pathology teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professor Pillay is president of the College of Pathologists of South Africa, chair of the NHLS Anatomical Pathology Expert Committee, advisor to the UK Royal College of Pathologists, and a member of the Ministerial Advisory Committee for the Prevention and Control of Cancer.

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These inaugural lectures offer a space to celebrate the achievements of our colleagues, engage with their scholarship and reflect on the ideas and values that shape our university.

I invite staff, students, alumni and friends of UCT to attend these lectures. Your presence and participation enrich the conversation and affirm the importance of academic exchange in our community.

Sincerely

Professor Mosa Moshabela
Vice-Chancellor

Read previous communications:

• From the UCT Executive
• Campus Announcements