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Welcome to the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of the Western Cape!


The Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UWC is a vibrant intellectual space dedicated to exploring the systems, ideas, and values that shape human experience and society. Through rigorous scholarship, we examine the complexities of our world and seek to address the challenges of our time. While our work is internationally recognized, we remain deeply rooted in the realities of South Africa and Africa. This dual commitment ensures that our teaching and research speak directly to pressing local and global concerns.

Our Faculty offers a broad range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, providing opportunities to study language, literature, philosophy, religion, sociology, geography, and more. We are also home to four research centres that focus on critical issues such as cultural and linguistic diversity, social justice, African epistemologies, and the role of the arts in reimagining society. These centres produce cutting-edge research that addresses local challenges while contributing to global debates.

We are proud to have partnerships with a wide range of institutions across Africa and the world. These collaborations allow for faculty and student exchanges, joint research projects, and shared learning opportunities that enrich our academic community. The partnerships thus encourage a dynamic exchange of ideas, enhance our global engagement, and provide our students and staff with diverse perspectives and experiences that are essential to addressing complex societal issues.

What You Can Do with a Degree in Arts and Humanities

An Arts and Humanities degree develops critical thinking, creativity, and analytical skills that are highly valued across various sectors. Our graduates excel in careers such as:
              •            Journalism, media, and communications
              •            Public policy and governance
              •            Education and academia
              •            Cultural and heritage sectors
              •            Business and entrepreneurship
              •            Non-profit and development work
Our alumni include award-winning authors, public sector leaders, educators, and social entrepreneurs. Their achievements demonstrate the adaptability and relevance of an Arts and Humanities education in addressing today’s complex and ever-evolving challenges.

STEAM, Not STEM

Globally, there is a strong emphasis on STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics—as a way to address pressing challenges in technology and innovation. At UWC, we advocate for a STEAM approach that incorporates the Arts and Humanities into these disciplines.

While STEM advances technical knowledge, the Arts and Humanities provide the ethical, cultural, and social frameworks needed to guide these advancements. By asking critical questions about meaning, purpose, and impact, STEAM equips graduates to approach challenges holistically, ensuring that solutions are not only effective but also socially and culturally relevant.

Undergraduate and Postgraduate Opportunities

Our undergraduate programs offer students the opportunity to engage deeply with diverse perspectives, fostering critical analysis, creative problem-solving, and intellectual curiosity. These programs provide a solid foundation for a variety of professional pathways.

For postgraduate students, the Faculty provides a stimulating research environment with opportunities to work alongside leading scholars. We offer a range of funding opportunities for postgraduate studies and postdoctoral research, enabling students to focus on advancing their academic and professional goals.

Through our international partnerships, postgraduate students also have opportunities to collaborate with global scholars and participate in exchange programs, broadening their academic horizons and enhancing their research.

Join Us

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UWC offers an education that is rigorous, inspiring, and deeply engaged with the realities of our time. Our graduates are prepared not only to understand the complexities of the world but to shape it in meaningful ways. We invite you to join our community of scholars and thinkers—to engage with pressing local and global issues, collaborate with world-class researchers, and contribute to the production of knowledge that transforms lives and societies.
 

Prof Sarojini Nadar
Acting Dean





The core activity of the Department of African Language Studies at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) is the teaching of Xhosa to both mother-tongue speakers (Xhosa Studies) and non-mother-tongue speakers (Xhosa Language Acquisition).
You are now at the heart of Afrikaans, the language which originated from the communities we serve. It is the language in which most people in this part of the country express their first words, live life to the fullest and breathe their last.
We are a community of anthropologists committed to the understanding of the complex world we live in. We continuously challenge commonplace assumptions and ways of being.
The Department of English at UWC is a leading interdisciplinary department in the humanities in South Africa.
The Department of Foreign Languages offers Arabic, French, German, and Latin from the first year, which are foundation courses, to the second- and third-year levels.
The Department of Geography, Environmental Studies and Tourism is a dynamic teaching and research department with a wide range of expertise in human and physical geography, GIScience, environmental management, and tourism.
The UWC Department of Historical Studies is committed to changing the ways that history is taught, written about and represented. 
Like its parent institution, our Department is alert to its African and international context. It strives to be a place of quality and a place to grow from hope to agency through knowledge.
South Africa is a highly multilingual society and recognises 11 official languages and hosts many more spoken varieties within its borders. In this respect, South Africa is typical of our world of complex translocal communities characterised by a linguistic dispensation where multilingualism is the norm.
Philosophy has undergone a regeneration at UWC. For years, it offered only a few modules, but now it is back with a full programme of modules for a major and new philosophers on the staff.
The Department of Religion and Theology at UWC offers modules in three subject areas, namely Theological Studies, Ethics, and Religious Studies. Collaborative research activities in the Department take place within six research frameworks, namely Religion; Ethics and Social Transformation; Religion and Gender; Religion and Development; Ecumenical Theology and Spirituality in Africa; Christian Ecotheology and Biblical Hermeneutics, and Rhetoric.
The Department of Sociology at UWC has a rich intellectual tradition steeped in the highest standards of research and academic rigour.
The Women’s & Gender Studies (WGS) Department is an inter- and transdisciplinary department that offers undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and engages in a wide range of collaborative research projects with local and international partners towards intersectional gender justice.
The Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS) was established in 1997 by its Founding Director, Prof. Kwesi Kwaa Prah, as a Pan- African Centre that would leverage the best available African expertise and scholarship to support a network of Africans addressing questions of interest to Africa. CASAS was donated in 2018 to the University of the Western Cape (UWC) to be located in the University’s Department of Linguistics, Arts and Humanities Faculty, by CASAS Founding Director, Professor Kwesi Kwaa Prah.
Since its inception in 2006, the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape has emerged as a crucial meeting point for researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences throughout Southern Africa.
The central brief of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research is to embark on a project of intellectual reorientation, namely a significant rethinking of multilingualism and the development of a new discourse with which to approach interdisciplinary work in the humanities and the education sciences.
The Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice is a research centre whose scholars challenge – contextually, theoretically, and methodologically – asymmetrical systems of power and commonly accepted assumptions about the social world and human experiences.
The University of the Western Cape (UWC) has a new Research Chair in Forensic Linguistics and Multilingualism. This Chair is housed in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, reporting to the Dean, Professor Monwabisi Ralarala.

This is the first of its kind in South Africa and on the African continent. Forensic Linguistics is a relatively new field of study in South Africa, though it is quite well established in places like the USA, UK and Australia.
The UWC Chair in Media, Inclusion and Diversity aims to advance research, foster dialogue, and promote media inclusion and diversity initiatives. It drives scholarship and community engagement that advances an understanding of the complexities of media representation and promotes media literacy and critical thinking skills within media studies and related fields. Housed in the UWC Arts and Humanities Faculty, the Chair is jointly held by UWC Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department, Sisanda Nkoala and Professor Leo Van Audenhove, who is a professor of New Media and International Communication at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and an extraordinary professor at UWC.

For more information visit: https://sites.google.com/view/uwcmidchair/home

You can also follow us on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/uwc-media-inclusion-and-diversity-chair
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