Join us for the Robert M. Stevenson Lecture, featuring guest speaker Carina Venter. The lecture will take place on Tuesday, April 28th at 4:00 PM in the Schoenberg Music Building Green Room. Venter will present a talk titled “On uncomfortable work: Thinking with and against what apartheid would not name,” exploring archival narratives of abuse within the classical music performance culture of apartheid South Africa.
In this talk, Venter argues that an archive inscribed in complicity and structured by silences and gaps expands the analytic focus of work on classical music and abuse beyond music institutions and patterns of asymmetric power to the political and intimate lives through which unnameable violence becomes visible.
Carina Venter is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at Stellenbosch University and Chair of the South African Society for Research in Music. She holds a doctorate and a master’s in musicology from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and an MBA from Stellenbosch Business School. Her research examines the entanglements of music and violence, with interests in apartheid aesthetics, historical trauma, gender, decolonial and postcolonial thought. Beyond music studies, her work engages questions of disability, access, and inclusive innovation across cultural and institutional contexts. Carina has published in journals including Social Dynamics, South African Music Studies, Transformation in Higher Education and Tempo. She has co-edited a special issue for the Journal of Musicology on music and landscape, and has contributed to an edited volume on Jacques Rancière published by Edinburgh University Press.
Dr. Venter is currently an early career research fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study and a research fellow at the National Humanities Centre, where she is writing a book on histories of trauma and abuse in South African classical music. In her delivery of the Spring 2026 Robert M. Stevenson Lecture, she will reflect on themes emerging from her current book project.