Prof Stephanie Cawood (PhD) is the current Director of the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State, a position she has held since July 2019. Prior to that, she was Acting Director of the Centre from October 2017. From 2012-July 2019, she also served as Programme Director of the Programme for Africa Studies. She obtained her PhD in 2011 with her thesis titled, The Rhetorical Imprint of Nelson Mandela as Reflected in Public Speeches, 1950-2004. In her work, she argued that the structure of human thought and consciousness is derived from the nature of embodied experience and that all forms of expression are the products of this dynamic interaction. Prof Cawood is experienced in interdisciplinary scholarship and from 2008 to 2010 successfully led a National Heritage Council-funded project on the oral histories and the cultural uses of clay at sacred sites in the eastern Free State. As scholar, she is interested in the interdisciplinary spaces between Africa and Gender Studies from a postcolonial/decolonial perspective with particular interest in matters of culture and heritage, rhetoric, the oral tradition (indigenous knowledge systems) and memory. She has taught in the Africa and Gender Studies programmes where she is involved in the supervision of postgraduate students and has successfully graduated 30 postgraduate students from Honours (10) through to Master’s (11) and PhD level (9). In 2013, she went to the University of Bologna on a staff exchange (EUROSA) and, in 2016, took up a visiting research fellowship at the African Studies Centre Leiden. From 2016-2019, she was awarded a Newton Advanced Fellowship from the British Academy and Newton Fund in collaboration with Prof Jonathan Fisher from the University of Birmingham to pursue research titled, The memorialising of struggle and the dynamics of memory, space, and power in post-liberation Africa. From 2008-2010 and again from 2018-2019, Prof Cawood collaborated with Dr Tascha Vos (Centre for Environment Management at UFS) on an interdisciplinary project called, ‘Testing the Waters’: The application of the Rapid Integrity Appraisal (RIA) model to Mohokare informal heritage sites. From 2021-2022, she also guest edited a special edition in the journal, Acta Academica, titled, Xenophobia in Africa, in collaboration with Prof Peter Olapegba from the University of Ibadan (Published Nov 2022).
Rhetoric and discourse (Cognitive linguistics, embodied realism, pragmatic constructivism)
Africa Studies (Postcolonial critique, thought systems, epistemology)
Gender Studies (Patriarchy, media representation)
Heritage Studies (indigenous knowledge systems, ritual, oral tradition and memory)
Culture and Media Studies (Pop culture, consumerism, media representation, gender)