Weekly Blog

The weekly research blogs appear without failr. They are think-pieces – food for thought – on a wide range of topics, including theoretical and methodological ideas, analyses of research data, shorter reflections, and opinion statements. Use the ‘Search’ box at the page’s top right with keywords to find things of interest, or just read through by title.

• Bowing out (30 June 2023)
  Best laid plans, 24 June 2023)
  seeing it (15 June 2023)
•  A letter in the political news (9 June 2023)
• remembering: documents of life (5 June 2023),
• Dating a Schreiner letter (27 May 2023)
• Technologies of writing (20 May 2023)
• Ken Plummerconference (12 May 2023)
• The writing laboratory (5 May 2023)
• Ego documents? (28 April 2023)
• kindness of strangers (21 April 2023)
• New Olive Schreiner letter (14 April 2023)
• Facts and fictions (7 April 2023)
• Borders and land claims (31 March 2023)
• Mafia society (24 March 2023)
• Public or private? (17 March 2023)
• Introducing whiteness  (10 March 2023)
• Correction! (3 March 2023)
• Miscellany : change, corruption, universities (24 February 2023)
• Knowledge in the blood? (17 February 2023)
• Code: Mary Queen of Scots (10 February 2023)
• Beneath the surface (3 February 2023)
• Decolonising knowledge (27 January 2023)
• Better late than never (20 January 2023)
• Peril in perspective (13 January 2023)
• Culture smart (6 January 2023
• 2023 intentions and resolutions (29 December 2022)
• Unwritten letters and the epistolarium (22 December 2022)
• An essence? (15 December 2022)
• Outages (9 December 2022)
• Signatures (2 December 2022)
• Poisoned land (25 November 2022)
• Farm murders (18 November 2022)
• Archive documents: provenance and evaluation (11 November 2022)
• ANC billionaires (3 November 2022)
• Critical race theory and decolonial theory (28 October 2022)
• False letters or true (20 October 2022)
• Birth to 30 (17 October 2022)
• Declaration of Arbroath, 6 April 1320 (7 October 2022)
• Reintroducing Olive Schreiner (28 September 2022)
• Colonial letters – conference (22 September 2022)
• No response (16 September 2022)
• Just a quick note (8 September 2022)
• Charles Dickens letters (1 September 2022)
  Zondo Commission book (25 August 2022)
• Anniversaries (18 August. 2022)
• The letter scenes in Eugene Onegin (11 August 2022)
• Recent traces (4 August 2022)
• ‘Whites only’ (28 July 2022)
• Letters from Iwo Jima (21 July 2022)
• Magic realism? (15 July 2022)
• Epistolary politics (7 July 2022)
• Another resignation letter (30 June 2022)
• With a forked pen (23 June 2022)
• Plato’s epistles and letterness WORKING PAPER! (16 June 2022)
  Plato‘s epistles 2 (10 June 2022)
• Plato’s epistles 1 (2 June 2022)
• A collecting habit (27 May 2022)
• Whites research (20 May 2022)
• A hidden hand (12 May 2022)
• Alida Badenhorst: name correction (5 May 2022)
• Eight days in July 2021 (28 April 2022)
• Curiosity and where it takes you (21 April 2022)
• Letters back then, here now (14 April 2022)
• Fallen idols in public space (7 April 2022)
• Statues, past and present (31 March 2022)
• The writer, reader, recipient, addressee (25 March 2022)
• Gossip, From Man to Man and interconnections (17 March 2022)
• Letters Live (10 March 2022)
• The enigma of letterwriting (4 March 2022)
• Olive Schreiner in the British Museum (25 Feb 2022)
• Storms, wind, rain, snow! (19 Feb 2022)
  Letter-writing and its rhythms (11 Feb 2022)
• The sense of an audience (4 Feb 2022)
• Catch-99! (27 Jan 2022)
• Visual letters, visual lives (21 Jan 2022)
• Historian (13 Jan 2022)
• White liberalism and its own reward (6 Jan 2022 )
• New Year’s greetings! (1 Jan 2022)
• Blogs and letters (30 Dec 2021)
• A Christmas letter: miscellany (23 Dec 2021)
• Speaking and writing: Emagusheni thoughts (16 Dec 2021)
• More or less white: Olive Schreiner’s address to the Universal Races Congress (11 Dec 2021)
• Mourning in a pandemic (2 Dec 2021)
• Black writing, white writing (26 Nov 2021)
• Histoire croissee (19 Nov 2021)
• Seeing Mrs Brown (11 Nov 2021)
• Turning points: How Olive Schreiner changed her mind about race (4 Nov 2021)
• What the b— (28 Oct 2021)
• The everyday fabric (21 Oct 2021)
• Auto/biography and everyday life, 3 December 2021 CALL for PAPERS (15 Oct 2021)
• Still hallucinating Foucault? (7 Oct 2021)
• What to do with postcards (30 Sep 2021)
• Xmas Ideas, letter ideas (23 Sep 2021)
• Writing Whiteness (16 Sep 2021)
• New Traces Available! (9 Sep 2021)
• What state capture means: Remembering Babita Deokaran (2 Sep 2021)
• The Zondo Commission, update (26 Aug 2021)
• The legalised butcheries of the Bushman race (19 Aug 2021)
• In 1837, drawing a colour line (12 Aug 2021)
• Please Sir: from the Emagusheni trading station (5 Aug 2021)
• An autobiographical pact, again (29 Jul 2021)
• What happens? (24 Jul 2021)
• The fire this time (15 Jul 2021)
• Thinking about change (8 Jul 2021)
• A letter, a judge decides, on state capture (1 Jul 2021)
• Do you have to like them? (24 Jun 2021)
• Letters from Moomintroll Valley’s creator (18 Jun 2021)
• Collingwood’s An Autobiography (10 Jun 2021)
• Time travelling thinking (3 Jun 2021)
• Degrees of evil? The power of the name (29 May 2021)
• Miscellaneous: at back of a metaphorical drawer (21 May 2021)
• On memory, research and South Africa (13 May 2021)
• Power/knowledge in the dust of time (6 May 2021)
• Olive Schreiner resurgent (29 Apr 2021)
• Jagger Library fire and manuscripts (22 Apr 2021)
• On imperialisms (15 Apr 2021)
• Who wrote his letters? Cicero, Petrarch, Watt, Shackleton Bailey, Walsh…? (8 Apr 2021)
• Who wrote it? Emily Hobhouse’s Vrouemonument speech (1 Apr 2021)
• The hand of Cronwright-Schreiner (25 Mar 2021)
• Can I have that in writing? Speak up! (18 Mar 2021)
• The beautiful ampersand (11 Mar 2021)
• Unlocking the past? (4 Mar 2021)
• Writing/speaking (25 Feb 2021)
• How the future occurs (18 Feb 2021)
• Writing to order (12 Feb 2021)
• A web of knowledge (4 Feb 2021)
• A visual parallel to the epistolarium (29 Jan 2021)
• A presidential inauguration (21 Jan 2021)
• Universal Letter Writing Week & children’s letters from the pandemic (14 Jan 2021)
• Cards (8 Jan 2021)
• Reconfiguring the past (1 Jan 2021)
• What is it? Memoir, autobiography, story (24 Dec 2020)
• Egazini and counter-memorialisation (17 Dec 2020)
• Olive Schreiner Centenary (11 Dec 2020)
• Olive Schreiner in threes (3 Dec 2020)
• Darwin’s notebooks (27 Nov 2020)
• The author, the writer, the editor and the president (20 Nov 2020)
• Letter from a president? (12 Nov 2020)
• Letters and articles (6 Nov 2020)
• Project website feedback (29 Oct 2020)
• Calling Schreiner Letters and Whites Writing Whiteness users! (22 Oct 2020)
• Small news (16 Oct 2020)
• The Schreiner sex book mystery continued (9 Oct 2020)
• Olive Schreiner’s ‘sex book’ – news! (1 Oct 2020)
• Order and chaos: Archives in South Africa (24 Sep 2020)
• Settler women in the Eastern Cape (17 Sep 2020)
• A miscellany (10 Sep 2020)
• The Vindolanda letters (3 Sep 2020)
• A new Schreiner publication? (27 Aug 2020)
• Three recent publications now available! (20 Aug 2020)
• Decide about the wagons, send the shears, the wretched Britons… (14 Aug 2020)
• Outage at Vindolanda (6 Aug 2020)
• The remarkable Olive Schreiner (31 Jul 2020)
• Sister Nannie resplendent (23 Jul 2020)
• Thinking about ‘race science’ (17 Jul 2020)
• On the memorial landscape (9 Jul 2020)
• South African War Memorials – new website launched! (2 Jul 2020)
• The company-state and sovereignty (26 Jun 2020)
• Now you see them… on statues, memorials and public memory (18 Jun 2020)
• The state we’re in: on company-states (12 Jun 2020)
• Wise words: epistolary ethics and letter-writing (4 Jun 2020)
• Letter-writing in the age of digital reproduction (29 May 2020)
• Connection (21 May 2020)
• How to read a letter (15 May 2020)
• The simulacra of co-presence (7 May 2020)
• The path of Ramaphosa’s letter (30 Apr 2020)
• A letter from the Grim Reaper (23 Apr 2020)
• The death of Elbert Theo Hemming in October 1918 (16 Apr 2020)
• The mind in a grasshopper state (9 Apr 2020)
• Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas (2 Apr 2020)
• Spoof letter, what is it? (26 Mar 2020)
• Thinking past coronavirus (19 Mar 2020)
• Understanding South Africa, really? (12 Mar 2020)
• Seeing Walmsley (5 Mar 2020)
• On knowing (27 Feb 2020)
• Capt Joshua Walmsley – again! (20 Feb 2020)
• Did the letter start it all? (13 Feb 2020)
• Colour blind? (7 Feb 2020)
• The pass system and its Others (30 Jan 2020)
• Surveillance capitalism and the information state (23 Jan 2020)
• Game parks and conservation: a P.S. involving letters (16 Jan 2020)
• Coexisting realities (9 Jan 2020)
• Race and class, class and race… (2 Jan 2020)
• Silent night? (26 Dec 2019)
• A diamond mining compound c1883 (19 Dec 2019)
• And thus ‘the history’ is made (12 Dec 2019)
• Bits and pieces aka varia (5 Dec 2019)
• The type of Boer (28 Nov 2019)
• A response, a reply and turn-taking (21 Nov 2019)
• Waiting (15 Nov 2019)
• Xenophobia or racism? (8 Nov 2019)
• Exciting letter finds! (31 Oct 2019)
• 8 documents in search of a theory (24 Oct 2019)
• White-ism (18 Oct 2019)
• A weekly round-up (10 Oct 2019)
• Olive Schreiner coincidences (3 Oct 2019)
• Writing an article (26 Sep 2016)
• Resigning (19 Sep 2019)
• Dear Mrs Schreiner, Dear Olive Schreiner… (13 Sep 2019)
• Olive Schreiner’s Poetics of Plants (5 Sep 2019)
• On ending without end, a diary thought (29 Aug 2019)
• Have a go, edit Wikipedia articles (22 Aug 2019)
• 11 November 1915: Dear Canon Mercer (15 Aug 2019)
• A missing letter? (8 Aug 2019)
• Is it a diary? (1 Aug 2019)
• A love affair with stationery (25 Jul 2019)
• Wikipedia on Olive Schreiner, like it or what? (18 Jul 2019)
• Modern South Africa (11 Jul 2019)
• From nationalism to nativism (4 Jul 2019)
• Writing at a gallop! (27 Jun 2019)
• The artist as a young man (20 Jun 2019)
• Translation and the differences it makes (13 Jun 2019)
• Lawfare (6 Jun 2019)
• Doing the business in starting to write (30 May 2019)
• A labourer, worthy of his hire (24 May 2019)
• Whites and blacks educated together… the ordinary procedure (17 May 2019)
• Mozart has just died! (9 May 2019)
• From the BBC: South African Elections & Charting Divides after Apartheid (2 May 2019)
• The now/past of the mind (27 Apr 2019)
• Albie Sachs on whiteness (20 Apr 2019)
• The ‘I-perspective’, Mozart’s letters and Elias’s argument (11 Apr 2019)
• The late Mozart’s letters: the I-perspective, the letters & Elias’s analysis (6 Apr 2019)
• Go for it: on reaching readers not bankrolling publishers (28 Mar 2019)
• More Elias on Mozart (21 Mar 2019)
• Epistolary biography and the letters of Mozart (14 Mar 2019)
• The importance of context: two paintings and what went into them (7 Mar 2019)
• Randlords bearing gifts (1 Mar 2019)
• Memoirs and letters, More on Queen Anne (21 Feb 2019)
• Favourite? Letters between Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill (14 Feb 2019)
• 1820 settlers just after arriving (7 Feb 2019)
• Parallel tracks? Diaries, letters, absences (31 Jan 2019)
• Just another white farmer? (25 Jan 2019)
• It is, isn’t it (18 Jan 2019)
• Cathy Riessman Symposium call for papers (10 Jan 2019)
• Researching, by following one’s nose (3 Jan 2019)
• The perennial questions of epistolarity (27 Dec 2018)
• Publications, in progress & just published (20 Dec 2018)
• Documents in search of a theory? (13 Dec 2018)
• In Eliasian fields (6 Dec 2018)
• A week of bits and pieces (30 Nov 2018)
• Nationalism: the mind becoming mucky (23 Nov 2018)
• Nationalism and race/racism (16 Nov 2018)
• Epistolarity and its others (9 Nov 2018)
• Edinburgh: X Press (1 Nov 2018)
• The immediacy of events (26 Oct 2018)
• The racialising process and the shadow state (18 Oct 2018)
• Crime in South Africa, 2017/18 (11 Oct 2018)
• On turns and differences (4 Oct 2018)
• Degrees of separation (27 Sept 2018)
• Bombardier John I Hemming (20 Sept 2018)
• now more about that now (13 Sept 2018)
• Concerning my hown Affairs  (6 Sept 2018)
• I tak up my pen, 8 December 1830 (30 Aug 2018)
• Drawing the line: what is racism and what is ‘just’ highly unpleasant (23 Aug 2018)
• Pronouns (16 Aug 2018)
• Using the WWW Edinburgh website  (9 Aug 2018)
• French letters (2 Aug 2018)
• 1960 (26 Jul 2018)
• In 1871 (19 Jul 2018)
• The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela (12 Jul 2018)
• Opening an Archive (5 Jul 2018)
• Livingstone Online (28 Jun 2018)
• Only the sound of a Mozart opera was heard (21 Jun 2018)
• Mozart (14 Jun 2018)
• How big is a letter? (7 Jun 2018)
• Migration, transnationalism & Chang family letters (31 May 2018)
• Hear the trace! The Forbes Diary, 15 December 1915 (24 May 2018)
• What is it? (17 May 2018)
• The medium and the message, thoughts on an envelope (11 May 2018)
• Letters in the news (4 May 2018)
• Postcards from Xolobeni (26 Apr 2018)
• In search of the traces: Van Gogh and archival research (19 Apr 2018)
• From the BSA conference: letters, diaries, travelling theory (12 Apr 2018)
• Here it ends with my pen, but not my heart (5 Apr 2018)
• New Olive Schreiner letters! (29 Mar 2018)
• Take a letter (23 Mar 2018)
• The epistolarium & South African letters (16 Mar 2018)
• Between the sheets (8 Mar 2018)
• The epistolarium reloaded: Olive Schreiner’s letters (1 Mar 2018)
• Miscellaneous (22 Feb 2018)
• Open letters, famous letters, and a settler colonialism footnote (15 Feb 2018)
• Colonial ambivalence, American settler colonialism and counterinsurgency (8 Feb 2018)
• More on settler colonialism (2 Feb 2018)
• Race and ‘nativism’ (25 Jan 2018)
• Settler colonialism, in the traces (18 Jan 2018)
• New WWW website news (12 Jan 2018)
• WWW webpages, and when only a letter will do (4 Jan 2018)
• A post-Christmas blog (28 Dec 2017)
• Colonialism, bureaucracy and the post (21 Dec 2017)
• When the seer is a reader (14 Dec 2017)
• St Jerome sits writing (7 Dec 2017)
• The manly art of letter-writing (30 Nov 2017)
• Catch-up on WWW news (23 Nov 2017)
• Schreiner letters & manuscripts – news (17 Nov 2017)
• Small news items: traces, writing projects (10 Nov 2017)
• A deed done: the Balfour Declaration  (2 Nov 2017)
• Concerning a letter, to three wives (26 Oct 2017)

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Last updated: 1 January 2022