As part of Duke’s Africa Initiative, The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), based in Johannesburg, South Africa is collaborated with the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Forum for Scholars and Publics at Duke to award two WISER-Duke Writing Fellowships for 2014. The Fellowships are intended for people who usually works outside of a university environment (e.g. as a non-fiction writer, journalist, independent researcher) and who would value the opportunity to write and reflect in a more academic environment. Fellows will spend five months at WISER and one month at Duke in 2014. WiSER is an interdisciplinary humanities research institute at Wits with a strong international profile. It was created twelve years ago to do cutting-edge research, and promote local and international debate, on the complexities of change in Southern Africa, understood from comparative and global perspectives. Research themes include The Afropolitan City, Futures of the African Archive, Categories of Persons, City Lives and City Forms, Digital Humanities, and Medical Humanities. For more information, see www.wits.ac.za/wiser. The 2014 Wiser-Duke Writing Fellowships have been awarded to Neo Muyanga and Khadija Patel.
Neo Muyanga
Composer
Neo Muyanga is a composer working on a libretto that reimagines South African protest music for the present.
Khadija Patel
Journalist and Blogger
Khadija Patel is a journalist/blogger writing a history of the Johannesburg suburb Mayfair, as its multiethnic residents negotiate newly Afropolitan identities while battling legacies of segregation.