The Faculty of Arts and Humanities is well known nationally and internationally. It offers high quality education at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in a variety of fields, and has a substantial research profile. Graduates are equipped with the skills of critical thinking, effective communication, and social responsiveness, and they have the ability to interact well in contexts of social diversity.
Our graduates have successful careers in the fields of media, journalism, education, marketing, public relations, publishing, editing, advertising, development work, information technology, library and archival work, translation, religious ministry, writing and consultancy.
Professor Monwabisi Ralarala, Dean: Arts and Humanities
The first year of undergraduate study for an Arts and Humanities degree offers a broad grounding in at least four subjects, improving students’ general knowledge and developing important thinking, communication, study and information technology skills. In the second and third year of the BA and BTh there is greater focus on the specific subjects which make up the majors of the degrees. The BBibl is a four-year programme, incorporating large parts of the BA curriculum. The courses of study in all subjects offer training which is of international standard, but which remains engaged with the specifics of our society. The combination of broad critical skills and knowledge with particular subject training is in high demand within the job market. Our undergraduate degrees also offer an excellent foundation for further study.
After the Bachelor’s degree, Arts offers an exciting range of postgraduate options at Honours, Master's and Doctoral levels. The Faculty is one of the leading producers of research at UWC; is home to many internationally recognised researchers and has partnerships with universities and institutions elsewhere in Africa and further afield.
We invite you to study in one of the most dynamic faculties in South Africa.
Professor Monwabisi Ralarala
Dean: Faculty of Arts and Humanities
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 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.
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 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.
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