Program Overview

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University of Cape Town Summer School Programs

The University of Cape Town offers a variety of summer school programs, including courses in literature, art, music, current affairs, history, philosophy, politics, economics, medicine, science, conservation, and nature.

Summer School 2026

The Summer School 2026 program includes special lectures, tours, excursions, and workshops. Some of the courses offered include:

• Action and reaction: how Western art evolved
• Adapting Jane Austen
• Art Deco: Spirit and Splendour
• Celebrating the best of Opera UCT
• Copy editing and proofreading: what's the difference. Who performs them?
• Glowfly Dance: Literature as changemaker
• In conversation: Parcel baby: aliases, apartheid and neurosurgery
• In conversation: Writing the family
• Irma Stern: finding her voice
• Jazz legends and their music
• Light, space and time: Physics in art
• Local inspiration: one writer on the Southern Peninsula
• Maria Callas: Prima Donna
• Music and the sensuality of harmony
• Music and the sensuality of harmony (lecture-recital)
• Northern Lights
• Oral historian or vulture? Documenting South African jazz legends after they've left us
• Seeing sound, hearing colour: Synaesthesia and the musical mind
• Sienna: Walls of Gold
• The Baroque: the age of kings
• The Italian Renaissance: the dawn of modern times
• The Medici Women
• The influence of the Medieval period on Shakespeare's plays
• To life, with love
• Writers bear witness: South African English literature 1948 to 1976
• Writers bear witness: South African English literature before 1948
• Writers bear witness: 'do angels wear brassières?' The child in post-colonial literature
• 'What to do with noodle?': humour in the Victorian novel

Current Affairs, History, Philosophy, Politics, Economics

Courses in this category include:

• A tug of memory: 21 years in the Karoo
• Along Karoo roads: Faces, Places & Roadside Encounters
• Building a capable intelligence apparatus: a case study of the intelligence operation against Pagad.
• Cecil John Rhodes in love
• Challenges in land reform: a judicial perspective
• Clickbait, chaos and credibility: how too spot fake news
• Darker shade of pale
• Desmond Tutu – Prophet to Power, Pastor to the People, Healer of a Nation
• Developing South Africa's rural areas
• Has democracy run its course?
• Hiroshima: eighty years on
• In conversation humanball: performance through connection
• Mastering others languages: the difference it makes in South Africa
• Metro matters: local reporting and the 2026 Local elections
• Narrative capture: how disinformation builds the architecture of oppression
• Navigating geopolitcal complexity:How did South Afica's G20 stack up
• Navigating retirement
• Navigating the Trump global era
• Reflections on coalition government and national dialogue: thirty years ago and now
• Sand, sweat and satellite phones: reporting war in the 21st century
• South Africa in 2026: priorities for action
• South African Trappist missions: triumph and tragedy
• Straight out of Pretoria:The news freshly squeezed
• The 1930s: The decade that changed the world
• The Afrikaner Rebellion 1914
• The Battle of Spioenkop: personalities and outcomes
• The Shadow State: Why Babita Deokaran had to die
• The age of decay: Ageing, shrinking populations and the decline of civilisation
• The crimes they are changing: exploring South Africa's evolving criminal landscape
• The language of emojis: forensic and legal linguistics
• The truth about Cape slavery: Challenging historical distortions
• Tracking the triggers: inside South Africa's firearm controversies
• Tradewinds: The cosmopolitan Swahili world
• Understanding Africa-China relations
• Unlocking South Africa's socio-economic potential
• Vines, wines and political designs
• We can fix it together - solutions to fixing South African education in a post covid road map.

Medicine

Courses in this category include:

• Current understandings of neurodivergence and practical implications
• Designed for life: the art of human-centred medical innovation
• HIV still matters: exploring pogress, challenges and why collective action remains critical
• Hot Topics in Neuroscience
  • Why empathy is breaking healthcare: The neuroscience of compassion
  • Adolescent mental health: a better understanding
  • Why does that hurt?
  • Traumatic stress across generations: epigenetic insights
  • Growing mini-brains: how stem cells are helping us understand what makes us human
  • How can I find the right person for persistent pain? Navigating the health care system in South Africa
• Music and medicine: integration of health and wellbeing
• The guinea pig club
• The origins of western medicine
• Vula: journeying from an idea in a rural clinic to revolutionising care for 2 million patients

Science

Courses in this category include:

• A 'just' transition' or just a transition?
• Altered states, dreams and archives
• Big telescopes: exploring the universe from the solar system to the big bang
• Cosmic Africa
• Crazy Crustaceans
• Enterprising echnoderms
• Geological deep time
• Monumental Molluscs
• Our Science ourselves: How gender, race and social movements shaped the study of science
• Out of this world and into the next
• Perceived scientific paradoxes
• Perplexing people
• Stupendpus spiders
• Twentieth century giants of science

Conservation and Nature

Courses in this category include:

• Cape honey bees: cognitive marvels
• Capturing water
• Chinese and Japanese gardens: differences and similarities
• Human in nature
• Newlands forest: bark harvesting and invasive alien plant species
• Waiting for evolution:The closer the baboons come the more we see ourselves. Are we prepared to look?

Information Technology

Courses in this category include:

• Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrencies
• From tradition to transformation: the ceo and the tech shift in mining
• Living with AI agents: navigating a future of digital collaboration
• The rise of the machines
• The rise of the machines

Practical Courses

Courses in this category include:

• How to write a novel
• Images observed, dreamed and imagined
• Ways of seeing
• Write your short story: from concept to completion

Irma Stern: Finding Her Voice

Course Description

Irma Stern is the most famous twentieth-century South African artist. Given that nearly 150 years have passed since her birth, and 2026 marks 60 years since she died, why is she still such a compelling personality and artist? The lectures will explore the voice of Stern through her correspondence with friends and colleagues, as well as her writing, and will use specific examples to illustrate her personal and social connections.

Lecture Titles

1. Irma Stern: her work, her life, her words
2. Irma Stern: artist and sitter, the power of place

Recommended Reading

• Arnold, M. 2003. A Reputation in Print in Irma Stern: Expressions of a Journey. Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery.
• Below, I. 2003. Between Africa and Europe in Irma Stern: Expressions of a Journey. Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery.
• Higgie, J. 2021. The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women's Self-Portraits. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
• Klopper, S. 2017. _Irma Stern: Are You Still Alive? _Cape Town: Orisha Publishing.

Course Presenter

Phillippa Duncan is an independent art advisor and researcher whose work centres on South African art from 1930 to 1980. She serves as art advisor and curator to the Claude Bouscharain and Erik Laubscher Foundation, which promotes research and engagement with South African post-war art.

Course Details

• Date: Thursday 22–Friday 23 January
• Time: 1.00 pm
• Course Fees: R230; Staff and students R115