Maurits van Bever Donker

Maurits van Bever Donker is director of the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. His research specialisation is in Black Consciousness Philosophy and Négritude, and examines the modes through which these global postcolonial and decolonial discourses re-script our understandings of political philosophy and the world. He also researches and teaches across Postcolonial Theory and Aesthetics, African Philosophy and Literatures, and Contemporary South African and African History. His monograph Texturing Difference is located at the intersection of postcolonial and critical theory, literature and philosophy. It situates the nuanced intervention of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa within the international conjuncture of anti-colonial thought and decolonisation.

Maurits van Bever Donker convenes a research platform in the CHR on New Ecologies of the Subject, and is the Principal Investigator for an NIHSS Postdoctoral Project (funding 10 postdoctoral fellows for two years) titled “A Practice of Postapartheid Freedom.” He is a lead researcher on “Communicating the Humanities” together with Professor Premesh Lalu, and convenes the lecture and discussion series “Humanities in Session.” He is also one of the editors in chief of Afrika Focus, and is co-chair of the Critical Humanities Spaces Network of the Consortium for Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI) together with Katharine Wallerstein.