EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
MEET THE TEAM BEHIND SASRIM
Carina holds a Doctorate of Musicology from the University of Oxford, Master’s of Musicology from the Universities of Oxford and Stellenbosch, and a Bachelor of Music from the University of Pretoria. She graduated in 2023 with a Master’s of Business Administration from Stellenbosch University’s School of Business as the top student in the MBA General (Modular) cohort. Fellowships and scholarships include a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford (2009), a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College, University of Oxford (2014-2017), A Stellenbosch University Strategic Fund award (2020-2022), and an Iso Lomso Visiting Scholar at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (2023). Her research interests centre on music, violence, trauma, decolonial thought, and discourses of apartheid and colonialism. Carina has published locally and internationally, and am motivated to think, write, and teach at the intersections of music, politics, and those questions that continue to render our present precarious and unequal. She has supervised students on a wide range of topics, including decolonisation of the tertiary music curriculum, trauma and violence in music, music and gender, and several South African composers. Her current cohort of postgraduates work on topics including the music of Philip Miller, musical theatre in the 1970s in South Africa, video-game music, music and rage, and psychoanalysis, curricular decolonisation, Afrikaans cabaret, and emancipative pedagogies. In 2023, Carina has been elected to take up an Iso Lomso fellowship (2024-2026) at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study to work on her latest project titled South African Histories of Trauma and Abuse in Institutionalised Spaces of Music Pedagogy and Practice. Carina’s latest publications can be read here, here, and here.
William is a senior lecturer in musicology at Rhodes University’s Department of Music and Musicology. He holds a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London and a Masters Degree in Musicology from Merton College, University of Oxford. He is interested in experimental South African music, technology, and issues of postapartheid modernity. His work straddles disciplines such as musicology, music analysis, decolonial theory, science and technology studies, critical theory, and hermeneutics. He has published articles in Twentieth Century Music, Perspectives of New Music, Tempo, SAMUS, Muziki and a number of other journals.
Hilde Roos is a researcher at Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University. Her work focuses on historical and contemporary representations of opera in South Africa with special reference to the intersection of the genre with politics and race. She has published widely about the Eoan Group, a so-called coloured opera group who performed opera during Apartheid. She is the author of The La Traviata Affair – Opera in the Age of Apartheid (University of California Press, 2018), and joint editor of “Sorry. I am what I am.” The life and letters of the South African pianist and opera coach Gordon Jephtas (1943–92) (Basler Afrika Bibliografien, 2023) and EOAN – Our Story (Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg, 2013). In 2020 she co-edited African Theatre – Opera and Music Theatre, exploring historical and contemporary traces of opera and music theatre on the African continent.
Hilde is also a founder member of the Black Opera Research Network, an international network of scholars that engage with conversations on the history, experiences, politics and practices of Black Opera.
Mieke Struwig is currently in the final year of her PhD studies under the guidance of Dr Carina Venter and Prof. Stephanus Muller where she is researching the intellectual history of institutionalised music studies in 20th-century South Africa. She completed her BMus: Performing Arts (Cum Laude) at Nelson Mandela University, specialising in clarinet performance. Here she received the Nelson Mandela University Vice-Chancellor’s medal in 2019 for the best first degree in the university. After a move to Stellenbosch University, she completed her MMus: Musicology (Cum Laude) in 2020 under the guidance of Dr Carina Venter, where she investigated the decolonisation of the BMus Curricula of four South African tertiary music departments. Her research interests include decolonial thought, intellectual and institutional histories and their relation to discourses of apartheid and colonialism as well as archival research. Her work has been published in SAMUS.
Bassist and composer Benjamin Jephta (30) has made a name for himself as one of South Africa’s premier double and electric bass players. A graduate of the jazz program at the University of Cape Town in 2013 he has performed both nationally and internationally since the age of 14 and he has worked with notable South African jazz musicians including Hugh Masekela, Sibongile Khumalo and many others. With two albums as a bandleader, multiple award nominations and wins, Jephta, the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans list recipient also received the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist for Jazz award in 2017.
Benjamin regularly sessions with various South African hip-hop and pop artists, as well as on TV programs including The Voice SA, Dancing with the Stars SA and musical directs the ‘late night’ show The Bantu Hour on SABC 2. After graduating from The Berklee Global Jazz Institute in Boston, USA, with a Masters degree he moved to New York City where he has since performed with Danilo Perez, Terri-lyne Carrington, Jason Palmer and Dianne Reeves among others. He is currently based in Johannesburg, working as a performer, film/TV composer and lecturing in Jazz Studies and Film Composition at the University of Witwatersrand.
Danni McKinnon is a music therapist and educator with a strong academic and professional background. She holds a Bachelor of Music Education from the University of Cape Town and a Master of Music Therapy from the University of Pretoria, where she is pursuing a PhD on anti-oppressive practice in music therapy. Danni is a part-time lecturer and clinical supervisor at the University of Pretoria and runs a private practice. She also teaches Creative Arts and woodwind instruments at St. Mary’s School in Johannesburg. Her experience spans educational roles, psychiatric hospitals, and research, including a UNICEF study on arts-based therapies during COVID-19. Danni has presented at conferences, served as an article editor for the Open Access journal Voices, and is the Africa liaison for the World Federation of Music Therapy.
Cara Stacey is a South African musician, musicologist and former winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist for Music (2021). She holds a doctorate in African music, specifically looking at the makhoyane musical bow from Eswatini (University of Cape Town/SOAS). Stacey has performed across southern Africa, in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Peru, the USA and Switzerland with the likes of Shabaka Hutchings, Sarathy Korwar, Mpho Molikeng, Galina Juritz, Natalie Mason, Beat Keller, Matchume Zango, Jason Singh and Juliana Venter. Cara is a Lecturer in Creative Music Technologies at the University of Witwatersrand.
Sibusiso Ncanywa is a PhD candidate at Rhodes University, supervised by Dr William Fourie. His PhD research explores the possibility of leveraging computer technology to determine whether or not a sound is produced by uhadi, which is a musical bow of amaXhosa. In this work, he is interested in testing the critical limits and biases of music information retrieval (MIR) machine-learning models as they classify uhadi. Inspired by discussions within the Indigenous Music Technologies working group, Sibusiso’s research bridges the gap between analogue and digital music technology.
He holds a Master of Music degree (Cum Laude), where his research explored the intersection of sound technology, choralism, and identity. His project investigated how identity in South African choral music is shaped by and challenges existing sound technology. Additionally, Sibusiso completed his BSc honours degree (Cum Laude), where his research focus was on African Art Music and Sound Technology.
His research interests include music/sound technology, the digitisation of analogue Indigenous music technologies, music information retrieval, artificial intelligence, metamodeling, decolonial thought, and indigenous knowledge systems.
Website: https://www.sibusisophd.co.za/
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3699-4057
Trained as a classical singer, Alida van der Walt (mezzo) holds BMus and BMusHons degrees in vocal performance from the Stellenbosch University. She recently completed a Master’s degree in Musicology at Rhodes University, investigating expectations of female respectability in classical vocal performance in South Africa, and supervised by Dr William Fourie. This project, which contained an artistic research component, firmly positioned Alida in the liminal space between practical musicianship and academia. Simultaneously musician and academic, her musical and academic projects are mutually constitutive and inform each other in an ongoing loop. Alida is currently a first-year PhD student, supported by the National Research Foundation through the SARChI Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma.
Marc Röntsch is a senior lecturer in musicology at the Odeion School of Music, University of the Free State.. He holds a PhD from Stellenbosch University, and has previously held postdoctoral fellowships at the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation, and Nelson Mandela University. His research focuses on the dialogical relationship between biography, archive and musicology, as well as further research interests in popular music and digital scholarly editions.
Marc’s current research focuses on underground alternative popular musicians from the Western Cape, as well as the intersections of auto/biography and music archives in the life and works of Zimbabwean-born composer Christopher Langford James. Marc is also a performing bassist and guitarist, and loves tea and coffee, reading, and Doctor Who.
Lindsay Friday received her master’s degree (cum laude) in Musicology in March 2023 from Stellenbosch University. Her master’s research, conducted at the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation, focused on a South African popular musician, Toya Delazy, and her online intersectional persona curation. She will begin her doctoral degree at Cambridge this coming October. Her research project theorises on the enactment of a South African national persona through music videos and constructs a history of South African music videos from the 1970s to the 2000s. This work is based in archival research.
Broadly speaking, her work and research interests centre on popular music, digital media, archives, and identity discourse. Beyond her research, Lindsay has remained committed to transformation work within the music department at Stellenbosch, contributing to the organization of events and initiatives alongside the Converse and Interventions teams. She has presented at three SASRIM conferences thus far, in addition to a variety of international conferences.
Bronwen Clacherty is a lecturer in African Music at the South African College of Music, University of Cape Town. Bronwen has a Bachelor of Music from the South African College of Music, University of Cape Town and a Masters in Community and Participatory Arts from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She completed her PhD in 2021 through the South African College of Music and the Re-Centring AfroAsia Project, at the University of Cape Town. Her doctoral and current research investigates Zanzibari women’s history, drawing on oral history, particularly songs and stories. Bronwen’s work also explores performance and creative work as an output for research studies. Bronwen is a performing musician, recording artist and composer and has released an album titled Uyandibiza with her ensemble, The Tholakele Project, which is available on streaming platforms. She has performed as a percussionist and soloist with orchestras such as the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra and the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra. She has performed in musical theatre productions, chamber music ensembles, performance art pieces and experimental theatre productions. Bronwen co-directs, composes, and performs with the multi-disciplinary, cross-continental Kukutana Ensemble with musicians from South Africa, Tanzania, Ethiopia, India and the US.
Matildie Wium is a senior lecturer in musicology and music theory in the Odeion School of Music at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Since completing her doctorate on the music of South African composer Arnold van Wyk (1916–1983) in 2013, she has maintained her research interest in twentieth-century South African art music, and has also broadened her focus to include the musical practices and experiences of female opera singers in mid-nineteenth century London. She has contributed to multiple edited volumes, and has published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association as well as several South African journals. Wium was awarded a master’s degree in vocal performance by the University of the Free State in 2016. She is married to Daniël Wium and the mother of two toddlers.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=xklYj_gAAAAJ
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matildie-Wium