Prof Helene Strauss, a distinguished professor in the Department of English at the University of the Free State (UFS), has been selected for an individual fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) for 2025.

Prof Strauss, who was awarded the prestigious 2022 UFS Book Prize for Distinguished Scholarship during the annual UFS Research Awards last year, says she feels lucky to be given this opportunity. She will be in residence at STIAS for the period 14 July to 12 December. 

“I am especially looking forward to joining the 2025 cohort of STIAS fellows and to spending quality time with peers from across the disciplinary spectrum. I have heard only good things about this experience,” she says.

According to the STIAS website, the institute invests in experts who work across disciplinary borders to tackle issues ranging from health equity to complexity theory, the effects of race to quantum information. STIAS was established to provide a “creative space for the mind”, a fellowship programme that would advance cross-disciplinary research at the highest level. Modelled on similar institutes internationally, STIAS is the first of its kind in Africa.

Reprioritising academic quality

Researchers and intellectuals selected for individual fellowships are invited to join “a cohort of leading thinkers in a creative space for the mind”.

“STIAS offers researchers an invaluable opportunity to step away from the ongoing clutter of teaching and administrative work. I appreciate their invitation to fellows to de-prioritise ‘quantitative performance measures while reprioritising academic quality as characterised by communication, curiosity, surprise, discovery, and societal relevance’ during their STIAS residency.”

Prof Strauss says: “I will be working on a book titled Phytospheric Justice”, whose research is about the symbiotic atmospheric pathways that connect plant and human breath. “I am interested in how literary and other creative cultural texts might open pathways towards ‘decolonial air conditioning’ (Hsuan Hsu) and the restoring – and re-storying – of human-plant kinship relations.

“In short,” Prof Strauss continues, “my book will consider how novelists, poets, artists, botanists and environmental activists across a range of global sites chart alternatives to breath-depleting atmospherics. I am curious especially about how creative cultural workers in contexts with overlapping histories of colonisation, deforestation and extractive violence imagine post-smog futures and advance the flourishing of multi-species breath.”

According to Prof Vasu Reddy, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Internationalisation at the UFS, this fellowship is not only a confirmation that Professor Strauss’s scholarship is deemed important and cutting-edge, but with this award, Prof Strauss also represents the interests of all UFS faculty in seeking out the best ways for us to support researchers as they exploit their curiosity, create their own research agendas, seek funding and other resources, and translate their work into relevant outcomes. “The STIAS fellowship is an honour befitting the work she has done and plans to undertake. It makes not just the Faculty of Humanities, but the entire university proud of this formidable recognition,” says Prof Reddy.