Department of Art and Music
Dr L Van der Merwe
| College of Human Sciences | |
|---|---|
| School of Arts | |
| Lecturer | |
| Tel: | 012 484 1011 |
| E-mail: | Leana.vandermerwe@unisa.ac.za |
Qualifications
- PhD (English) Queen Mary University of London
- MA (Fine Arts) University of Pretoria
- BA (Fine Arts) University of Pretoria
Currently teaching
- Introduction to Art History (1st)
- Visual Culture II (3rd)
- The Practice of Art History (Hons)
- Gender and Feminisms (Hons)
Fields of academic interests
- Landscape (in art and literature)
- Environmental art and ethics
- Gender and feminisms
- African feminisms
- Critical race theory (whiteness)
- African modernisms
- Contemporary South African Art
- Postcolonial theory
- World literature
- Comparative literature
- Performance
- Memory and nostalgia
Field of Specialisation
South African modern landscape painting, and environmental aesthetics in contemporary art; specifically, performance-based works that deals with landscape in the broadest sense as both natural and manmade place. I have an interest in reading art together with literature, and performance, within postcolonial contexts. Furthermore, I investigate nature, and what is deemed ‘natural’ as gendered, and implicated in complex local and global networks of power.
Journal articles
- ‘The Horizontal Sublime in Post-apartheid Gothic Landscape’, de arte 58.2 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1080/00043389.2024.2311504
- ‘White childhoods in South Africa During Apartheid: The Ideology of Landscape in Children’s Book Illustrations’, in The Politics of Design: Privilege and Prejudice in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia & South Africa, edited by Federico Freschi and Jane Venis (Dunedin: Otago Press, 2021) pp. 113-136. https://issuu.com/opresearch/docs/the_politics_of_design.
- ‘Writing Desire and History: Collecting as Postcolonial Feminist Methodology in South African Art,’ International Journal of African Renaissance Studies 14.2 (2019), 151-170 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/18186874.2019.1690398
- ‘Sacrificial Bodies as Corporeal Articulations of Violence in the Work of South African Female Artists’, Image and Text 24 (2014), 8-30. https://journals.co.za/content/imtext/24/1/EJC165111
Paper presentations
- Race & Gender in South African Colonial Gardens. Paper presented at the annual conference of the South African Visual Art Historians held at the Durban University of Technology in September 2022.
- Journeys of Memory and Loss in a Novel by Lien Botha. Paper presented at the annual conference of the South African Visual Art Historians held online in July 2021.
- Resisting the Picturesque: Deborah Poynton and the Garden Sublime. Paper presented at the annual conference of the South African Visual Art Historians at the University of Cape Town (2019).
- Loss and Desire in the Garden. White Women in South African Art and Literature. Paper presented at a colloquium on ‘Literature and other arts’, held at the University of the Western Cape (March 2019).
- Writing Desire and History: Emergent Postcolonial Feminist Figurations in Recent work of Dineo Seshee Bopape and Bessie Head. Paper presented at the annual conference of the South African Visual Arts Historians (July 2017).
- Towards and African Feminist Theory of Art: Bessie Head and the Idiosyncrasies of History and Locale. SAVAH conference 29-31 (July 2016).
- Giving Character to Conservation: Collaborative Strategies in Arts Education. Andrew W Mellon lecture held at the University of Pretoria on 28 October 2013 as a part of the Visual Technologies Mellon Foundation funded research project (2013).
- Corporeal Feminism in the Work of Penny Siopis. Paper presented the 27th annual conference of the South African Visual Arts Historians, 4-7 (July 2012).
Professional positions, fellowships & awards
- Ernest Oppenheimer Scholarship for Overseas Studies
- Euverard Trust Scholarship for Postgraduate Studies