Humanities Academic Gets Vice-Chancellor’s Research Award

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Professor Sarojini Nadar of the School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics (SRPC) was recently awarded the prestigious 2015 Vice-Chancellor’s Research Award which recognises UKZN researchers for exceptional quality and proven achievement with sustained records of scholarship.

The award is given to a scholar who is under the age of 40.

Nadar says she is deeply honoured and humbled by the award. Despite receiving the Department of Science and Technology award for Distinguished Young Woman in Science in 2012, she believes the Research award is more special since her own institution is recognising her work.

She felt there was much to celebrate in 2015, since her son, Nathan, scooped six distinctions in his 2015 Matric examinations.

Said Nathan: ‘My mom fully deserves this award. It is another addition to her wide array of achievements and accomplishments. She works really hard and I am extremely proud of her.’

Professor Gerald West, who nominated Nadar for the award, said: ‘Professor Sarojini Nadar is one of the few PhD students I have supervised who has gone on not only to make significant contributions to the research fields in which she works but who has reconfigured the research terrain.

‘Her interdisciplinary work in the intersections between gender studies, biblical studies, and religious studies has generated innovative theoretical and methodological resources, shaping the terrain in new ways.  Professor Nadar’s work inhabits the interface between the academy and local communities, and here too she has made substantive theoretical and methodological contributions,’ he said.

Nadar considers herself to be an activist-academic, hence it was her passion for gender social transformation that led her into the world of academia. ‘I bring my commitment to social justice to bear on the research and teaching I undertake, and I also use the tools and resources of the academy in my community engagement,’ she said.

Her advice to emerging researchers, is to do research on what they are most passionate about rather than simply because it is a requirement of the University. ‘I often say to my nieces and nephews, that you know you are in the right career when you can answer in the affirmative to the question: Would you still do this if you were not getting paid to do so?’

Asked about her future plans, she replied: ‘During the next five years I intend to focus my research on the feminist episteme in the context of the study of religion. I am interested in the various ways in which feminist knowledge is produced in a fragmented and fragile South African Higher Education context. How such knowledge is produced, taught and disseminated within Higher Education contexts nationally and internationally is what interests me.’

‘I am most pleased therefore that I have also just been awarded a Newton Grant by the British Academy for a bilateral project with the University of Leeds titled: Queering the Curriculum: LGBTI, Sexuality, and Masculinity Issues in Theology & Religious Studies in South Africa and the UK.

*Sarojini Nadar is a full professor in and leader of the Gender and Religion Programme at UKZN. She served as Dean of Research in the College of Humanities in 2012 and 2013, and has researched and published widely in the field of feminist biblical hermeneutics, with a special focus on HIV and AIDS; gender-based violence; masculinity and sexuality.

She also has a special interest in studying and developing theories of feminism in Africa, and more recently has developed an interest in gender and Higher Education research.

She is an NRF-rated researcher and was a Research Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in 2014 when she received a National Commendation Award for Teaching Excellence from the Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of South Africa and was also the winner of the 2013 UKZN Distinguished Teachers’ Award.

She was the winner of the National DST Distinguished Young Woman in Science Award: Human and Social Sciences in 2012.

In 2009 she received the UKZN Top Woman Researcher Award, and in 2006 won the UKZN Book Prize for best edited book titled: African Women, Religion and Health: Essays in Honour of Mercy Amba Oduyoye, co-edited by herself and Isabel Phiri.

She was selected and featured by the Mail & Guardian in their 2008 Book of South African Women, and in 2016 will feature in a book by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAF) on female scientists in Africa.  

Melissa Mungroo