Duane Jethro

Duane Jethro is a lecturer in the Department of African Studies and Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. He specialises in the analysis of the cultural construction of heritage and contested public cultures.

A graduate of Utrecht University, he was junior research fellow at the Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town between 2020 and 2022, and pursued a research project taking a multiperspective approach to the loss and salvage of the University of Cape Town Jagger Library and its collections after a devastating fire in April 2021. He was co-curator (with Michaelis Galleries curator Jade Nair) of the Jagger Library Memorial Exhibition in April 2022, and co-organised a symposium, After the Fire: loss, archive and African Studies with Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative postdoctoral research fellow Alirio Karina.

Between 2019 and 2020 he worked as a researcher at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, CARMAH, at the Humboldt University in Berlin, which was founded and directed by Professor Sharon Macdonald. He held an Alexander von Humboldt Georg Foster Post doctoral research fellowship and was also based at CARMAH between 2017-19. And he is an associate research fllow at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town.

He serves as ambassador scientist and on the selection committee for the Alexander von Humboldt German Chancellor Fund for South Africa. Since 2023, he also serves on the executive committee of the Association for Critical Heritage Studies. He has published in the International Journal of Heritage Studies, Material Religion, African Diaspora and Tourist Studies. He is an editor of the journal Material Religion and serves on the editorial board of the journal Museums and Social Issues. His book Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Aesthetics of Power is published by Bloomsbury Academic.