POSITIONS HELD
2015-2017:
Freelance writer/storyteller for hire.
Lecturer, Freie Universitaet Berlin International Summer and Winter University (FUBiS)
2009-2014:
Lecturer, Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Dec 2012-Jan 2013:
Erasmus Mundus Visiting Fellow at the Free University of Berlin, hosted by Prof. Paul Nolte in the Department of Contemporary History, Friedrich-Meinecke Institute
2006-2008:
AW Mellon Research Fellow in the Humanities, Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa
2001:
AW Mellon Visiting Fellow, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, New York, NY
1999:
AW Mellon Honours Fellow in the Humanities, University of Cape town.
FAVOURITE THING IN CV:
English Academy of South Africa Thomas Pringle Award for Best South African Short Story for 2013 for the short story Duel over a Dear. See publications.
PUBLICATIONS
Publications with peer review process:
van Vuuren, L., (2013): “The Africa I know”: Film and the Making of ‘Bushmen’ in Laurens van der Post’s Lost World of Kalahari (1956). In Recreating First Contact: Expeditions, Anthropology and Popular Culture, Eds. Bell, J., Brown, A., Gordon, R. (Washington: Smithsonian Scholarly Press), 215-230
van Vuuren, L. (2010) ‘And he said they were Ju/hoansi, the people…’: History and Myth in John Marshall’s ‘Bushmen Films,’ 1957-2000. Journal of Southern African Studies. 35(3). 557-574
van Vuuren, L, (2010) Review Essay: ‘A Tale of Two Cities: Sex Selling Imagined/ Sex Selling Described’. Kronos: Southern African Histories. 36. 336-339
van Vuuren, L. (2010) ‘Duel over a Dear’. New Contrast: South African Literary Journal. 38 (2). 79-88
van Vuuren, L. (2007). ‘An Act of Preservation and A Requiem’: The Great Dance: A Hunter’s Story (2000) and Technological Testimony in Post-Apartheid South
Africa’. In Marginal Lives and Painful Pasts: South African Cinema after Apartheid. Ed. Both, M. (Cape Town: Genugtig Publishers)
van Vuuren, L. (2006) ‘‘Filming ‘Bushmen’ in Laurens van der Post’s Lost World of Kalahari. Kronos: Southern African Histories. 32. 139-161 van Vuuren, L. ‘The Many Myths of Laurens van der Post: Van der Post and Bushmen
in the Television series Lost World of Kalahari (1956)’, South African Historical Journal, 8 (2003), pp. 47-60)
Publications without peer review process:
van Vuuren, L. ‘Achtung South Africa’. Mail and Guardian. 28 March 2013. p. 13. Available online at http://mg.co.za/article/2013-03-28-00-berlin-achtung-south-
CONFERENCES AND SEMINAR PAPERS
‘Ulrike Meinhof and the Temptations of Myth’, paper presented at the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland, 66th Annual Meeting, Cardiff University, Wales, 3-5 April 2013
‘‘South Africa is my Germany’: Re-thinking Ideological Violence through Case Studies from Germany’, paper presented at Institute for Humanities in Africa, University of Cape Town, 21 February 2013
‘Notes from Underground: Ulrike Meinhof and the Temptations of Myth’, seminar paper presented at the Department of Contemporary History, Humboldt University, Berlin, 25 January 2013
‘Notes from Underground: Ulrike Meinhof and the Temptations of Myth’, seminar paper presented at the Free University, Berlin, 24 January 2013
‘Ulrike Meinhof against Apartheid?: Thinking about the Many Myths of a West German ‘Revolutionary’’, presented at the Historical Association of South Africa’s Biennial Conference on ‘Doing History’, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, 6-7 July 2012
‘Ulrike Meinhof and the Myth of the Radicalised Subject’, seminar presented at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, 9 May 2012.
Thinking about Radicalised Youth Culture in 1968: A South African/West German Comparison, paper presented at the University of Cape Town’s New Academic Practitioners Programme, 20-21 January 2012 at Mont Fleur Conference Centre, Stellenbosch, South Africa
History in the Making: Film and the making of ‘Bushmen’ – Some Thoughts on a PhD, University of Cape Town, Department of Historical Studies, African and Comparative History Research Seminar Programme, 9 May 2007
Filming the Bushmen: A Historical and Critical Analysis of Some Films 1925-2000, Stellenbosch University History Seminar, 10 August 2006, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Landscape as God: The Bushmen in Documentary Film: 1956-2000, Film and Media Colloquium, University of Cape Town, 30 May-to 1 June 2005
The Many Myths of Laurens van der Post: Van der Post and the Bushmen Myth in the television series Lost World of Kalahari, International Film and History Conference, University of Cape Town, 6 -8 June 2002
THESIS
PhD thesis: The Great Dance: Myth, History and Identity in Documentary Film Representations of the Bushmen 1925-2000 (2006)
“We Tell Stories the Way We Like”: The Widows of the Cradock Four
52 minute historical documentary film submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements of the Honours degree in Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, 1999. This film is currently used as a teaching aid in Gender, Politics and Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
We Tell Our Stories the Way We Like: A Critical Analysis of the Making of a Historical Documentary Film
Mini dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements of the Honours degree in Historical Studies, University of Cape Town (1999)