From the Vice-Chancellor
UCT inaugural lectures for June 2025
30 May 2025
Dear colleagues and students
The University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Inaugural Lecture series honours the academic excellence of colleagues who have been promoted to full professorship. These lectures are a public platform for newly appointed professors to share their research journeys, showcase their scholarly contributions and spark meaningful dialogue within the university community and beyond.
In the month of June, we will host just one lecture in this series.
I am pleased to invite you to an inaugural lecture by Professor Jennifer Whittal from the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics in the Faculty of Engineering & the Built Environment. Professor Whittal will deliver a lecture titled “Beyond Boundaries” on Tuesday, 3 June 2025 at 17:15 SAST in the Chemical Engineering Seminar Room on upper campus.
In this lecture, Professor Whittal will explore how geospatial technologies illuminate the history of local boundaries and their enduring role in spatial injustice. She will reflect on disciplinary shifts, African capacity building and the challenges of high-water mark boundary disputes. Drawing from her extensive academic and professional experience, she invites the UCT community to reconsider literal and conceptual boundaries – those we create to navigate systems like law, land administration and technology – and how these shape and sometimes obscure our understanding of real-world complexity.
Marcel Proust once wrote: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” This spirit of re-seeing is central to Professor Whittal’s work. By examining early Dutch land grants at the Cape and their continued influence on the modern landscape, she demonstrates how geographical and social context – ‘local is lekker’ – matters deeply in reforming land tenure and cadastral systems. Her lecture offers a compelling call to reimagine boundaries with resilience, plurality and justice at the core.
Professor Whittal is a professor in the Division of Geomatics within the Faculty of Engineering & the Built Environment. She began her journey at UCT as an undergraduate student in surveying and later completed her master’s degree here. After working for the City of Cape Town, she returned to UCT as a lecturer and earned her doctorate in cadastral systems reform from the University of Calgary. She now teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the Geomatics Division and is widely recognised for her excellence in teaching and supervision.
A registered professional land surveyor, Professor Whittal plays a prominent role in national and international geomatics bodies. She has served as president of the Institute of Professional Land Surveyors of the Western Cape and currently serves on the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) Foundation board. She was the founding chair of the FIG Mentoring Programme for Africa and will serve as technical chair for the prestigious FIG Congress to be hosted in Cape Town in 2026.
Her research focuses on pro-poor, sustainable land tenure and cadastral systems, particularly in coastal zones and historically complex regions like the Cape. A published author, regular reviewer and external examiner, Professor Whittal continues to contribute meaningfully to academic and professional discourse.
This lecture is an opportunity to engage with critical questions about land, identity and justice through the lens of geospatial science. I encourage members of the UCT community and the broader public to attend and be part of this thought-provoking dialogue.
I look forward to celebrating Professor Whittal’s achievements and contributions through this inaugural lecture with all of you.
Sincerely
Professor Mosa Moshabela
Vice-Chancellor
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The UCT Inaugural Lecture Series
Inaugural lectures are a central part of university academic life. These events are held to commemorate the inaugural lecturer’s appointment to full professorship. They provide a platform for the academic to present the body of research that they have been focusing on during their career, while also giving UCT the opportunity to showcase its academics and share its research with members of the wider university community and the general public in an accessible way.
In April 2023, Interim Vice-Chancellor Emeritus Professor Daya Reddy announced that the Vice-Chancellor’s Inaugural Lecture Series would be held in abeyance in the coming months, to accommodate a resumption of inaugural lectures under a reconfigured UCT Inaugural Lecture Series – where the UCT extended executive has resolved that for the foreseeable future, all inaugural lectures will be resumed at faculty level.
Recent executive communications
2025
2024
Professor Susan Cleary delivered her inaugural lecture on 14 March.
14 Mar 2024 - 5 min read
2023
Prof Lydia Cairncross’s inaugural lecture provided a snapshot of the career path of a surgeon and community activist whose commitment to social justice means her work doesn’t end in the operating theatre.
02 Nov 2023 - 8 min read
2022
Professor Linda Ronnie is in UCT’s Faculty of Commerce.
28 Sep 2022 - 6 min read
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2021
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016 and 2015
No inaugural lectures took place during 2015 and 2016.