Bilateral Research Chair in Digital Humanities to strengthen UK–South Africa collaboration

The bilateral UK-SA research chair in Digital Humanities, under the South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) may provide more opportunities for the University of Edinburgh and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) to deepen their strategic partnership.

Iginio Gagliardone, Professor in Media Studies at Wits University, has been appointed as Inaugural Chair.

The Chair is expected to break new ground in the Digital Humanities, broadening understanding of the role of technology in society and re-centring Africa as a space of radical technological innovation. It will also significantly expand research capacity in Digital Humanities and strengthen international collaboration.

Edinburgh and Wits – a strategic partnership

Since the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding in 2018, Edinburgh and Wits have built a significant institutional partnership that spans research, teaching, innovation, and student and staff mobility.

Joint efforts include the Wits-Edinburgh Sustainable African Futures (WESAF) doctoral programme, the Wits Entrepreneurship Clinic, collaborative seed-funded research, and a range of initiatives across digital innovation, health, inequality, environmental science, and entrepreneurship. This new Chair and our existing collaborations with Wits provide further potential for Edinburgh and Wits’ shared commitment to transformative, interdisciplinary research.

Co-Investigator, Professor Christian Vaccari, Chair in Future Governance, Public Policy, and Technology at the University of Edinburgh, says: “Professor Gagliardone’s timely project exemplifies the kind of innovative, boundary-crossing research we champion at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. By connecting diverse intellectual traditions and addressing urgent global challenges, this Chair will help reimagine how knowledge is produced and shared at a time of profound technological and social transformation. It also highlights the vital role of international collaboration in shaping more inclusive, just, and equitable digital futures.”

Africa and digitisation

Advancements in literature, scholarship, research, and the arts over the past decade in Africa have begun to show how forms of knowledge that have been historically marginalised can offer pathways to reimagine more humane ways of interfacing with digital innovation.

This Chair comes at a transformative moment for the relationship between the humanities and the digital, as well as for where and how Africa is positioned in innovation ecosystems (or processes), 

We are witnessing a turn away from the narrow understanding that digital tools merely enhance the study of the humanities. There is a growing acknowledgement of the pivotal role the humanities play in shaping more just and inclusive information societies.

Professor Iginio Gagliardone Professor in Media Studies at Wits University

Digital Humanities in action

Archives are often seen as static: resources accessed by experts for research purposes but not widely relevant to the public. However, digital tools — and artificial intelligence in particular — have the potential to reshape this view.

Many scholars at Wits and other South African universities are using existing archives, or creating new ones, not only to safeguard the past, but also to imagine new futures. “This can take the form of using indigenous knowledge and African architecture to generate new visions of African cities, or of building on precolonial economic and social history to imagine how relationships among individuals and societies might differ if we once again tap into seemingly lost forms of sociality.”

“These new practices are informed by distinctive qualities of the humanities in the Global South. It is not about rewriting ‘capital-H’ history, but about allowing multiple ‘lowercase histories’ to emerge as inspiration for new ways of coexisting,” says Gagliardone.

The first five years

The Chair in the Digital Humanities aims to produce a substantial body of high-quality research outputs over the next five years, delivering scholarship, training, and innovation at the highest level.

Additional research outputs will take the form of repositories, providing curated datasets for the Chair’s network, global partners and the broader academic community.

Working with Edinburgh

Wits has highlighted strong potential for collaboration with Edinburgh through joint supervision of PhD students and integration of the WESAF programme into the Chair, particularly within the humanities. Discussions between Professor Iginio Gagliardone and Professor Cristian Vaccari, Chair in Future Governance, Public Policy and Technology at the University of Edinburgh have already identified opportunities to align existing projects, notably around information disorder and computational social science, with scope for comparative research across Europe and Africa. 

Building on longstanding professional relationships, coordination is expected to be both productive and flexible, supported by structured engagements such as regular online meetings. In addition, Wits sees opportunities to deepen partnerships with several Edinburgh colleagues and to pursue joint funding bids through UNA EUROPA, building on existing links with partner universities in Helsinki and Bologna.

About Professor Iginio Gagliardone

Iginio Gagliardone is Professor of Media Studies at Wits University. He is also an inaugural Fellow of the newly launched Wits Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery Institute — the Wits MIND Institute — an African-based interdisciplinary AI research hub.

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