In July 2012 Lize Kriel was seconded from the University of Pretoria - 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.
Lize Kriel's contribution to the objects section of this website: