Exceptional academic achiever

Prof Danie Prinsloo, Head of the Department of African Languages and Chairperson of the School of Languages in the Faculty of Humanities, once again received the Exceptional Academic Achiever Award from the Principal on 25 March 2009. What makes this even more exceptional, is the fact that he has received the award for the fourth consecutive time!

Several organisations have recognised his work in African languages, including the former Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology for the development of spellcheckers for 10 South African languages, and the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX) for his investigation into the lexicographic needs of isiNdebele. He was nominated as one of the University of Pretoria’s 100 leading minds over the past century in 2008. Some of his most important publications have dealt with corpus-based African language lexicography focusing on lemmatisation strategies and the compilation of electronic dictionaries for African languages. He cooperated in the building of the first part-of speech tagger for Sepedi, which is the gateway to new technologies for Sepedi. Prof Prinsloo is a member of numerous professional bodies, national associations, work groups and advisory committees. He has served on the boards of many of these bodies, as well as on the editorial committees of several journals. He has a B1 rating from the NRF.

Inaugural address

Congratulations to Prof Andries Wessels, Head of the Department of English, who delivered his inaugural address on 24 March 2009. The title was “Human kind cannot bear very much reality”: modernist perceptions of time and experience.

Summary of the address

The historical period during which literary modernism flourished was a time of great historical and social upheaval. This First World War had broken down structures (of class and gender, for example) which had been regarded as immutable. People felt themselves at sea in a new and unfamiliar world. While the modernists were revolutionaries as regards literary form, bringing about sweeping changes in the way art was being enacted, reflecting the disintegration of social cohesion in their work, many of them were surprisingly conservative in their views of life and society. The instability in their art reflects the threatening changeability of the world they found themselves in, and the conservatism of their thought reflects a longing for stability, certainty, something to derive meaning from. The awareness of a moment of transcending consciousness is common to a number of modernist writers. TS Eliot describes the “moment in and out of time”, James Joyce calls his version “epiphany”, Virginia Woolf contemplates the “moment of being” and EM Forster ponders the “eternal moment”. In all these expressions, not only a hankering for the complete, the stable, the meaningful is expressed, but also a supreme and experiential confidence that there is more to life and art than the ephemeral and the transient.

Academy prizes awarded to UP personnel

The Council of the South African Academy for Science and Arts recently confirmed several awards which will be presented to the receivers on 27 June 2009.

Medal of Honour for Visual Arts (marketing) awarded to former student

The Medal of Honour for visual arts (marketing) by the SA Academy of Arts and Science will be awarded to Mr. Francois de Villiers, executive creative director at the marketing agency, Draftfcb, Cape Town.

Mr. De Villiers is one of the most creative directors in the South African marketing environment and has been responsible for some of our country’s most memorable brand names. Vodacom’s Yebo Gogo (of which the words have been included in the Oxford Dictionary), the Klipdrift with “eish”, and the RSG-sheep concept are just some of the best known brand names that can be mentioned.

Mr. De Villiers is a former student of the Department of Visual Arts and has been nominated for the prize by this department. It will be awarded to him in June 2009 during the Academy’s Centenary celebrations in Bloemfontein.

The Stals prize for Art History has been awarded to Prof Alex Duffey, from the University of Pretoria. Prof Duffey’s contribution to art history is characterised by the versatility of his field of interest and the way that he approaches Art History as a multidisciplinary field of research. His research covers, amongst others, the domains of history, archeology, museology, fine arts, art theory, art history and art education.