BA (Hons); MA; DPhil (History) (UP)
Tel: +27 12 420 5732
E-mail: [email protected]
https:/up-za.academia.edu/LizeKriel

In July 2012 Lize Kriel was seconded from the UP Department of Historical and Heritage Studies to the Department of Visual Arts in order to teach Visual Culture Studies. She is interested in knowledge production in colonial contexts, and the ensuing cultures of reading, writing and printing. She has a C2 rating from the NRF and is a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Kriel currently studies the written correspondence between European and African missionaries in the 19th century Transvaal as images, trying to make sense of the way content and appearance jointly contributed to the changing meanings ascribed to these letters over time.In another ongoing project she traces the transcontinental circulation of letters and exchange of objects between Christian women in East Africa, South Africa, East and West Germany from the 1930s until the 1970s. Together with Dr Annekie Joubert of Humboldt University, Berlin, she is also involved in a project on the Hoffmann Collection of Northern Sotho Cultural Heritage, where she investigates the production, circulation and consumption of missionary Carl Hoffmann’s ethnographic, religious and biographical writings, illustrations and photographs in academic journals, popular magazines and books amongst Northern Sotho, Afrikaans, English and German audiences over the first six decades of the twentieth century.

Research focus areas: Reading, writing and printing cultures, memory and nostalgia, missionary legacies 

Research highlights since 2003

2003: The Scramble for Soutpansberg: The Boers and the partition of Africa in the 1890s, Scientiae Militaria 31,2: 74-91.

2004: Negotiating contested space: African Christians, white missionaries and the Boer conquest of the Blouberg, late nineteenth century Transvaal. Kleio (African Historical Review) 36: 184-169.

2004: Same War, Different Story: a century’s writing on the Boer-Hananwa War of 1894. Journal of Southern African Studies 30,4: 789-810.

2004: Tini’s Testimony: the significance of a meticulously recorded case of sexual abuse on a Transvaal Mission Station, 1888-1892. Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 21,2: 271-284
(also published in: Karin van Marle (ed.), Reflections on becoming: Sex and gender in postapartheid South Africa, Pretoria University Law Publishers, Pretoria, 2006.)

2005: Writing the ‘natives’ out: Blouberg as a landscape of conquest in the colonial literature of the 1890s. South African Journal of Cultural History 19,2: 46-71.

2005: Revenge of the novel: Christoffel Coetzee’s subversion of history’s claim to authority in the Anglo-Boer War discourse. New Contree 49: 64-74.

2006: I. Hofmeyr & L. Kriel, “What is Book History and why does it matter to Historians of Southern Africa?”, South African Historical Journal, 55, 1: 1-19.

2006: A. Kirkaldy & L. Kriel, Converts and conservatives: Berlin Mission representations of Khosi August Makhahane and Khosi Matsiokwane Leboho in the Northern Transvaal, c. 1870-1900. Le Fait Missionaire, 18: 109-144.

2007: Reverend Watkins’s books, Innovation 25, December: 56-80.

2007: L. Kriel, A space too vast and silent? German deaconesses and the patriarchy of the Berlin Mission in Apartheid Transvaal, Comparativ 17, 5/6: 55-75.

2008: Intersections of gender and race in the missionary correspondence of deaconess Anneliese Dörfer, East and South Africa, 1936-1967. Historia 53, 2, November: 98-125.

2008: L. Kriel, From private journal to published periodical: gendered writings and readings of a late-Victorian Wesleyan’s ‘African Wilderness’, Book History, 11: 169-198.