Professor Jacqueline Rose to present the 2017 VC's Open Lecture

Dear colleagues and students

I write to invite you to the first Vice-Chancellor?s Open Lecture of 2017, which is to be presented by Professor Jacqueline Rose. Titled ?The Legacy or What I Have Learned From You?, the lecture will take place on Thursday, 16 March 2017, at 18:30 for 19:00 in Kramer LT1, Kramer Law Building, Middle Campus, University of Cape Town.

The Vice-Chancellor?s Open Lectures provide an opportunity for anyone in the Cape Town community, whether they are connected to the university or not, to have the benefit of hearing first-hand from academics, researchers and innovators who have distinguished themselves in their areas of expertise. Attendance is free of charge as the series is one of the ways that the university seeks to give back to the Cape Town community.

Jacqueline Rose is Professor of Humanities and co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. Before moving to Birkbeck, she was Professor of English at Queen Mary?s College. Professor Rose is a fellow of the British Academy and a life member of St John?s College, Cambridge University. She is a graduate of Oxford University, the Sorbonne and the University of London.

As one of the United Kingdom?s most celebrated public intellectuals, her work on the relationship between feminism, psychoanalysis, literature and politics is internationally acclaimed. Her Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986) was translated into German, Slovenian and Turkish. It was also selected as one of the opening titles for Verso?s Radical Thinkers series. Her groundbreaking 1991 book, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, won the Fawcett prize and became the subject of a conflict with Plath?s literary estate.

The publication of The Question of Zion, dedicated to Edward Said, in 2005, offered a reading of the psychic terrain of Zionism as a movement. Translated into Arabic and Hebrew, it generated heated debates in the context of the Israel?Palestine conflict. It was part of a series of books by Rose on the conflict, including Proust Among the Nations: from Dreyfus to the Middle East (2011) and The Last Resistance (2007), to be reissued as a title in Verso?s Radical Thinkers this year. Conversations with Jacqueline Rose was published in 2010 and The Jacqueline Rose Reader in 2011.

Professor Rose is a regular contributor to the Guardian and the London Review of Books in which she has written on a variety of topics, from the Dreyfus affair to a celebrated essay on Marilyn Monroe, and from the Oscar Pistorius murder trial to, most recently, an essay on transgender politics. The Pistorius trial was also the topic of Professor Rose?s inaugural lecture in 2015 at Birkbeck.

Previously, she has written on South Africa?s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and on the writer Bessie Head. Her most recent publication is Women in Dark Times (2014) in which she offers a new template for feminism through discussions of the lives of women from radically different walks of life who are nonetheless united by how they bring the unspeakable to light.

Dr Victoria Collis-Buthelezi from the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) will deliver the formal response to Professor Rose?s lecture.

Sincerely

Dr Max Price
Vice-Chancellor