We Are Our History Conversations is a series of Bodleian Libraries’ talks by artists, scholars and researchers opening up critical engagement with archives.
Two talks are scheduled for Hilary Term:
Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Cut/Copy/Paste: Collage as a form of reading and writing the archive
Tuesday 23 January 2024, 1pm–2pm, Lecture Theatre, Weston Library – Book your free place
Oxford is a host and a nexus of the colonial archive, an epistemological reference point on the historicity of empire building and meaning making. In this talk, Dr Tinashe Mushakavanhu marshals critical and creative tools of reading, writing, and editing black lives and black bodies in the archives of Cecil John Rhodes, institutional histories of museums and universities in Southern Africa, and the creation of ‘fictional’ languages such as Shona.
Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a Junior Research Fellow in African & Comparative Literature at the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT), St Anne’s College. He holds a PhD in English from University of Kent (England) and completed postdoctoral work at University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). He has an interest in literary archives from southern Africa and interrogates issues to do with literary legacies. Apart from writing journal articles, book chapters, this work also manifests through a series of creative publications, exhibitions and digital humanities projects.
Sadiah Qureshi, Tracing the Legacies of Empires of Extinction
Monday 19 February 2024, 4pm–5pm, Lecture Theatre, Weston Library – Book your free place
Professor Sadiah Qureshi is an historian of racism, science and empire. She has recently joined the University of Manchester as Chair in Modern British History. Her first book, Peoples on Parade (2011), explored the importance of displayed peoples for the emergence of anthropology. She is currently writing her next book, provisionally entitled Vanished: Episodes in the History of Extinction, for Allen Lane, supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. In 2023, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Library.