Luan Staphorst

Luan Staphorst is a DPhil candidate at University of Oxford and a Research Associate of Nelson Mandela University. He is Mandela Rhodes Scholar (2020-2021) and Abe Bailey Fellow (2019) with a MA (Philosophy) from the University of the Western Cape, a MA (Linguistics) from Nelson Mandela University, and a MSc (African Studies) from Oxford.

His doctoral dissertation engages with questions of the desire for and emergence of language in and through literature over time, how this particular desire relates to forging ethical and epistemic relations with the (Animal and non-Animal) Other, and how analysing a Southern literary system could offer an alternative understanding of such a poetics of translationality. The Bleek and Lloyd archive of |xam orature and the various forms of textualisation the archive has experienced over the past century in the South African literary system is the central vehicle through which these questions are explored, but texts from outside this system, notably from the British, Continental European, and Western Classical tradition, are brought into comparative conversation as well.

His DPhil studies are supported by the Clarendon Fund, Open-Oxford-Cambridge Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership, Lincoln College Kingsgate Fund, and the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust. His research has, amongst others, appeared in Educational Philosophy and Theory, Critical Arts, Journal of Southern African Studies, and the Palgrave Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore.