“We need to intensively grow our research profile in the faculty,” says Professor Kevin Thomas, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at UP, who outlines the direction that he hopes to take the faculty in under his leadership.

Having moved from Cape Town to take up his appointment as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria (UP) from May 2024, Professor Kevin Thomas has frequently been asked what it’s like being in Pretoria.

“I’m very happy here, and I didn’t move from Kazakhstan, so being in Pretoria is not that different to Cape Town,” says Prof Thomas, a renowned scholar in neuropsychology. “One place has a mountain and ocean, but the people are similar; it’s the same country.”

His contribution to the field of research on brain-behaviour relations includes work on how to help people with neuropathological conditions such as HIV infection or Alzheimer’s disease.

“The reason I moved to Pretoria is because I was excited by the opportunity to advance the Faculty of Humanities within UP’s research-intensive trajectory and be part of the journey to grow the institution’s international reputation and influence,” he says. 

Prof Thomas spent many years in the US studying and as an academic. After matriculating in Johannesburg, he was awarded a scholarship to do a BA in Psychology at Harvard. He went on to obtain an MA in Clinical Psychology at the University of Southern California and a PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Arizona. He was a postdoctoral fellow in neuropsychology at the University of Florida before returning to South Africa to take up a position at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

As the former Head of the Department of Psychology at UCT, he was a founding member of UCT’s Applied Cognitive Science and Experimental Neuropsychology Team (ACSENT) and the co-founder of the African Neuropsychology Network.

“To a large extent, my move from the US to Cape Town was motivated by the opportunity to build ACSENT,” he says. “If I’d stayed in the US, I would have taught and become an expert in one area of neuropsychology research, but I wanted more than that.”

The fact that the post was back in South Africa was a bonus, he says.

“As much as you adjust to being in a different country or continent, you’re not from there; you are always an outsider. I managed this well, but when you return to your home country, you really know you are home, and a big part of this is your cultural reference points – from the sense of humour to the Springboks. Of course, we all also face issues related to crime, load-shedding and a complex political situation, which can be worrying factors, but overall, it is good to be home.”

Why are you pursuing a research-intensive trajectory in the faculty?

The faculty has many positive aspects that can be built on. I’ve looked at its strengths and challenges, and how big and crucial a part the Humanities play in a university that foregrounds STEM disciplines. One goal is to elevate the Humanities to a far stronger position. Its current strengths revolve around the depth and breadth of the undergraduate teaching courses, drawing huge numbers of students to courses such as first-year English, Psychology, History, Political Science, and Social Work and Criminology.

The challenge this creates is that many of our academics spend a lot of time teaching and, often, this isn’t advancing them in a research-intensive university like UP, which weights research in terms of academic advancement and promotion. Neither is it gaining them recognition abroad. Globally, the top research-intensive universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale and many others) hire and retain academics on the back of their research.

We need to intensively grow our research profile in the faculty for several reasons: to retain and attract the best academics; to increase funding ­– as we know, active research programmes that deliver novel results can bring in considerable funding; to enhance our international and global research networks and partnerships; and to contribute to building UP’s local and global reputation.

Following from this, I am encouraging all our academics to balance their teaching commitments with research outputs. To achieve this, I am engaging with heads of departments and line managers to rotate courses so that one academic doesn’t get stuck doing the same course each year. We need to spread the load and allow people to teach in allocated blocks each semester, then give them less or no teaching responsibilities in other blocks so they can pursue research. This has to be done intentionally throughout the faculty; it’s not a simple task, as we have 12 individual departments, a School of Arts that comprises the divisions of Fine Art, Music and Drama, plus several research units and centres.”

Which partnerships and collaborations are you fostering locally and internationally?

We need to be discerning about our partnerships as they must enhance the reputation of both the Faculty of Humanities and UP, and actively promote a two-way exchange. What is very much to UP’s advantage is that we’re located in a city with a great many embassies and high commissions with diplomats from throughout the world. They’re very much part of our UP community and there is a lot of cross-pollination with the University. For example, our Department of Political Sciences is strongly engaged with the diplomatic community, as are several of our centres, including the Centre for Asian Studies, the African Centre for the Study of US Studies and the Centre for Mediation. We need to grow these relationships as part of our international outreach.

In my own field, the African Neuropsychology Network (ANN) is partnering with clinicians and researchers dedicated to the growth of neuropsychology in Africa. We are developing neuropsychology for Africa by Africans and collaborating with scholars doing neuropsychological research throughout the continent. ANN and ACSENT are good examples of how to build a critical mass of talented scholars who grow the output of novel research through collaboration, thereby attracting recognition and funding, and producing graduates who make their mark and grow the research network. I’m very proud that many of the graduates are now full-time academics and researchers at universities in South Africa and abroad.

In terms of our local partnerships, a significant focus area is community engagement, and several of our curricular courses and modules, particularly in the Departments of Psychology and Social Work and Criminology, require students to engage with our local communities and deliver clinical services. We are also partnering with citizens who would like to pursue a postgraduate diploma while they are working. Our MA in Development Studies and honours diploma programme in Psychology have both been approved. We hope to start both at the beginning of 2026. Recognition of prior learning is very much part of this to admit enrolment.

How is the faculty equipping students for the world of work and the artificial intelligence (AI) era?

This is a key question for the University as a whole and there are several different growth areas.

We have to be aware of what our partners in industry and the private sector need from graduates. Our curriculum isn’t driven by these needs, but in our engagements, we listen carefully to the kinds of skills they need recent graduates to have to function appropriately in the workplace. This includes being digitally literate; the faculty has a course that introduces students to digital literacy and computational skills.

As far as new degree programmes go, we are introducing a new, future-thinking degree programme that will hopefully be approved this year, focusing on human-technology relations and interfaces. The Humanities are all about how humans function in the world, our effect on society and the environment, and the effect on us ­– the two-way effect – which requires the development of critical thinking skills, and strong reading, writing, content absorption and evaluation skills.

Applying these skills to digital and AI technology is central to the world today across all disciplines and fields. The human-technology interface programme will be open to students within and outside the Faculty of Humanities. As deans and academics, we want to break down boundaries and silos between our faculties. At its core, this degree programme is transdisciplinary. We hope that departments within other faculties will make an intellectual contribution to this programme. It also has the ingredients to be offered as an external short course, run with Enterprises UP.

There is increasing debate about AI; our position is that while we’re keenly aware of addressing the challenge that it poses to teaching and assessment, and ways to monitor and regulate this, the AI era is here. What we need to do is teach an understanding of how these models are built, how algorithms work and how generative AI such as ChatGPT needs to be used critically, as its outputs can be limited or systematically biased. We also need to emphasise that if you get ChatGPT to write an essay for you, you’re not learning how to write and think critically.

You study brain-behaviour relations – what do we still need to learn about the brain?

Every year, researchers learn more about the brain and how it contributes to different aspects of cognition, emotion and behaviour, but we’re still trying to work on classic hard problems, such as where does consciousness reside; how do we develop consciousness and how does this regulate behaviour; and how do individual cells and their communication functions contribute to complex behaviour?

Another core area is cross-cultural neuropsychology ­­– how does culture affect brain function? If you scan a brain you cannot tell the culture of the person, but the effect of culture and environment on the raw hardware of your brain is immense. There is far less research on this in Africa than in the West; hence the importance of the African Neuropsychology Network.

How do you relax?

I go to the gym and watch movies. I’m a fan of well-scripted movies with clever dialogue and interesting visual composition. The only genres I don’t enjoy are romantic comedies and fantasy.

My most important form of relaxing is to spend time with my family – my wife, Emma, and our three children. This takes up most of my time outside of UP. Fortunately Emma, who is an organisational psychologist, was keen to make the move to Pretoria as most of the opportunities in her human resources field are in Gauteng. Our three children have also settled in well. Our eldest, Kirsten, is now at UP; Jenna is in matric; and James is in Grade 6. Pretoria has excellent schools, and in February we moved into the home we bought in Groenkloof.

I believe in having firm boundaries for time out from work to relax, and for mental health and well-being. It is not admirable to promote excessive working hours. We all have to do something that helps us switch off, whether it’s relaxing with friends and family or taking part in sport and exercise or involvement in hobbies. I talk to my colleagues about this and encourage this in the faculty.