Shamil Jeppie, "The State of the Humanities in South Africa: Reflections on Two Recent Commission Reports"

A Duke Africa Initiative event - co-hosted by the FHI

Prof. Shamil Jeppie is an historian of Africa and a senior research fellow at HUMA, Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town. Prof. Jeppie served on two leading commissions investigating the future of the humanities and the social sciences in South Africa. His research interests span the history of Ottoman colonization of the Sudan, and he has been a leading voice in preserving the manuscripts of Timbuktu and documenting the history of those manuscripts. He also work on contemporary consumption patterns in South Africa. He is the author of "Language Identity Modernity: The Arabic Study Circle of Durban" and the "The Meanings of Timbuktu" in addition to several other edited works and publications.