San and Khoi Heritage between Archive, Anarchive and Meta-Archive

Join us for a talk on the many digital humanities projects by Grant Parker, Associate Professor of Classics, and African and African American Studies at Stanford, on October 10th, between 4 and 5:30 pm. He will talk about digital exhibition and curation possibilities for multimedial South African Archives spanning centuries. This talk is co-hosted with the Colonialism, Post- and Anti- in the Digital Age workshop. You can join in person in Wallenberg Hall, Room 433A. We will have appetizers for the talk. Please RSVP here.

This event is co-hosted by CESTA (Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis) , and CPADA Workshop at Stanford Humanities Center, and co-sponsored by the Department of African and African American Studies, and the Center for African Studies.

Abstract

This talk offers a survey of recent attempts at digitizing heritage materials around the first peoples of Southern Africa, and plots what a forward path might be. At issue is the very notion of archive itself, and the ways in which traditional archives might become the basis for new, more inclusive curations.

About the Speaker

Grant Parker is Associate Professor of Classics, and African and African American Studies at Stanford. works on Latin literature, monumentality and digital humanities in a comparative framework. He joined Stanford from Duke University in 2006, having studied at the University of Cape Town and Princeton University and serving as a postdoc at the University of Michigan spanning the new millennium. He teaches Latin as well as Greco-Roman literature in comparative contexts. His publications include The Making of Roman India(2008) as well as Rome's Egyptian obelisks. He has edited or coedited two books on South African engagements with Greco-Roman antiquity. South Africa, Greece, Rome: classical confrontations (2017) has its own website. More recent work has focused on global receptions of Virgil, especially the Eclogues and Georgics. One of his first publications was The Agony of Asar: a thesis on slavery by the former slave, Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein, 1717-1747(Markus Wiener Publishers 2001), and he continues to be interested in comparative approaches to enslavement. Since January 2024 he has divided his position between the Department of Classics and the new Department of African and African American Studies.