Humanities 2015 Researcher of the Year Arts Cluster

Mr Rory du Plessis, Department of Visual Arts

Rory du Plessis (BA Visual Studies, BA(Hons) Visual Studies, MPhil Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health) has been a full-time lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Pretoria since 2011. He is pursuing a PhD with the Division of Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health (UP). In 2014 he was awarded a doctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany. Rory’s research focuses on the photographs taken at the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, South Africa, during the superintendence of Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees, 1890 to 1907. The photographs provide the most comprehensive record of asylum visual culture from South Africa during the nineteenth century. Over several publications Rory has argued that the asylum’s photographic practices were varied, complex and constituted by a multiplicity of styles and genres. In view of this claim, he demonstrates how a reading of the asylum’s photographs can be open to an array of interpretative frameworks.