Meet the Cape Town Faculty
Classes offered by the Cape Town Program are taught by local faculty, the Center Director and by one Stanford Faculty-in-Residence per quarter.
Faculty in Residence
Each quarter, one Stanford professor serves as Faculty in Residence in each of the BOSP program locations. These faculty teach classes in their own disciplines, developing courses that incorporate unique features of the local culture and environment or that provide comparative perspectives on a particular topic. View a list of current and future faculty.
Local Faculty
Prof. Ulrike Rivett
Prof. Ulrike Rivett was born in Germany and did her undergraduate degree in geomatics engineering at the University of Munich. She moved in 1995 to South Africa for her PhD studies at the University of Cape Town which were based on a collaborative project with the Getty Conservation Institute Los Angeles, US, to digitize the Laetoli Footprints in the Serengeti. This interdisciplinary project between IT and archaeology resulted in her focus on research where IT can assist to further the goals of other disciplines. In 2000, she was employed at UCT as a lecturer in the Department of Geomatics and started working in the field of ICT for development. Her focus changed towards the use of IT in addressing the challenges of HIV/AIDS and she started with a group of students and colleagues an NGO to develop mobile phone-based application to support HIV positive people during their treatment. In 2011 she started iCOMMS, a research group who investigates the use of ICT in the water and sanitation sector. She has worked on projects with the Gates Foundation, the World Bank, the German Academic Exchange program and the South African Water Research Commission. She has published widely in the field of ICT for development and has also received a number of awards for her work with communities and the innovative use IT applications. Since 2018 she is the Director of the newly founded School of IT at UCT.
Prof. Helen Scanlon
Prof. Helen Scanlon is the convener of the Justice and Transformation Program in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. Between 2012 and 2015 she was the head of the Gender Studies Department at UCT. Until 2011 she was the Director of the International Center for Transitional Justice’s (ICTJ) Gender Justice Program where she worked as a practitioner on issues of justice and post-conflict transformation. Before joining ICTJ, Helen was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Conflict Resolution in South Africa, working on peace-building in Africa. She holds a Ph.D. in South African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Her book Representation and Reality: Portraits of Women’s Lives examines gender and politics in South Africa during apartheid. She has published widely on the subject of gender, peacebuilding and transitional justice in Africa.
Prof. Tammy Wilks
Prof. Tammy Wilks is a professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town. Her research examines the dynamics of conflict and coexistence amongst religious communities in Nairobi, Kenya. She was a visiting professor at Yale University and Colgate University before her tenure at the University of Cape Town.
Prof. Kurt Campbell
Prof. Kurt Campbell is the Director at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. He is a past Harvard University fellow and visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota, Indiana University and the American University in Cairo. He has developed productive interdisciplinary dialogues as an artist, curator and academic writer. South Africa’s recent political past and the accompanying legacies often feature in his research. Crucially, this focus is not to re-inscribe the ideas of ‘race’ or ‘apartheid’, but rather to assist with a final critique of these boundaries and thus contribute to a potentially richer self-concept for individuals as they move in the intellectual world.His recent research is dedicated to South African rock art epistemology after apartheid.
Prof. John Parkington
Prof. Parkington is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cape Town. His research and teaching interests include hunter gathers, Southern African prehistory, human ecology and palaeo-environments, archaeological method and theory, prehistoric rock art, and coastal archaeology. John is founding trustee of the Clanwilliam Living Landscape Project, a community-based initiative to create jobs and community education through practical utilization of archaeological research.