Program Overview

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:

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

Summer School 2025

The Summer School 2025 program includes free lectures, tours, excursions, and workshops. Some of the courses offered include:

• History, Philosophy, Politics, Current Affairs, Economics:
  • 2024 Elections: from US to Europe, India and Iran
  • Eighty years since D-Day
  • Raiders, traders and crusaders: how the Baltic Rim shaped the world
  • A socio-political journey through sport
  • Africa: a battleground for the Russia-Ukraine war?
  • An intellectual tour of Asian popular culture
  • Disinformation nation: how smear campaigns and character assassins can shape a country
  • Elections 2024: why the DA Mmusi Maimane, Songezo Zibi and Zackie Achmat failed
  • Existentialism: origins, meaning and implications
  • Fantasy and fact in immigration politics and policy
  • How South Africa survived State Capture and the lessons
  • How to win the war on corruption
  • Italian prisoners of war: the real story of their captivity in in South Africa during World War Two:
  • Karoo Roads
  • Lessons from the Springboks
  • Organised crime on our doorstep: exposing the underworld's extensive reach
  • Remembering the Union Castle shipping line
  • South Africa's State owned enterprises: From state capture to governance reform
  • South Africa's multiparty government: success or realignment
  • Sudan: past, current and future
  • The challenge of economic development during the financialised phase of capitalism
  • The human impact of large-scale disaster
  • The world and South Africa beyond 2025: the lates flags, scenarios, and probabilities
  • Tony Heard: his life as a journalist
  • Understanding Africa-China relations
  • Cartooning ructions: when the parallel universe intersects with the real world
  • Winnie and Nelson Mandela
• Conservation and Nature:
  • Green Zone landscapes
  • Landscape heritage and garden design
  • Nan Lian Garden
  • Seabirds of the Benguela Bounty
  • Southern African documentary film-making
  • The mystery of mossess
  • What is that tree? exploring the diversity of trees in urban areas in Cape Town
• Information Technology:
  • Applications of AI
  • Symbolic artificial intelligence in the age of ChatGPT
  • Cancelled:The role of ethics in scientific knowledge and emergent technology
  • Will robots take my job?
• Medicine:
  • Anaesthesia during the Anglo-Boer War
  • Chinese medicine
  • Hot Topics in Neuroscience
    • Acute stroke: the what, the who and the where to
    • Dementia: overview and new directions
    • Ketamine: revolutionary new treatment for depression or pseudoscience?
    • The neuroscience of forgiveness
    • The use of mushrooms in the treatment of mental health disorders
  • Implementation of the NHI
  • Legalisation of assisted dying
  • Pacemakers for hearts save lives
  • Palliative care: a fundamental aspect of universal health coverage
  • The neuropsychology of Long Covid
  • The paradox of a life changed by a lung transpalnt
  • Towards a Proton Beam facility for cancer
  • Unlocking the mind: exploring the frontier of psychiatric genomics
• Practical Courses:
  • A journey in Colour
  • Chinese for beginners
  • Italian Intermediate
  • Lets write about life
  • Not definite: 'first hand eye'
  • Unleashing your creativity through writing
• Science:
  • Amamzing amphibians
  • Are we stardust or nuclear waste?
  • Big ideas in the biological sciences:do we have free will?
  • Bizarre birds
  • Carbon dioxide: the trace greenhouse gas of life
  • Climate crises and opportunities in South Africa 2025
  • Finding 'old fourlegs' : the recent history of the coelacanth
  • How far away is the sun?
  • Ice ages: past, present and future
  • Incredible insects
  • Life history recorded in bones and teeth
  • Marvelous mammals
  • Rediculous reptiles
  • Spaceflight in the 21st century
  • The lion's historian
  • The marvels of electricity
• Literature, Art, Music:
  • A month in Provence
  • An uncomfortable paradise:a history of dispossession and slavery in Simon's Town
  • Art, serenity and conflict: a tale of five cities
  • Art, tattoos and extra-ordinary lives: writing trailblazing women
  • Ausi told me
  • Crooked seeds
  • Debussy and impressionism: the triumph of light
  • Empire of spies
  • Every day is an opening night: a troubadour tells his story
  • Hamlet? I saw it on Radio
  • How to listen to classical music: enhancing your understanding and appreciation
  • J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations
  • J.S.Bach reinvented
  • Manet: master of the modern idiom
  • Mussorgsky: pictures at an exhibition
  • One more sea to cross
  • Pens versus guns: challenging colonialism
  • Phases, phrases and palindromes
  • Rising stars in concert: Opera UCT
  • Cancelled The Arabic-Afrikaans witing tradition: history and development
  • The Frozen North: Inuit art and culture
  • The Sonnet
  • The South African Musical
  • The art of the illustrated book
  • The meaning of a life: a South African scientist's tale
  • The painted Christ
  • The poetry of God
  • The young Picasso
  • Writers bear witness: the Second World War
  • Writers bear witness:between the wars 1919 -1939
  • Writing reviews that resonate - book bashing or not?

Summer School 2024

The Summer School 2024 program includes architecture and the built environment, conservation and nature, excursions and tours, information technology, law and human rights, literature, art, music, medicine, philosophy, politics, current affairs and history, practical courses, and science.

Summer School 2023

The Summer School 2023 program includes literature, art, music, philosophy, politics, current affairs and history, medicine, science, conservation and nature, information technology, and practical courses.

Maria Callas: Prima Donna

Maria Callas: Prima Donna is a sixty-five minute ballet that brings the extraordinary life of Maria Callas to the stage. The production is choreographed and directed by Mario Gaglione and features a cast of five dancers. It blends physical poetry of dance with rare video interviews with Callas herself, creating a powerful dialogue between past and present, the icon and the individual. The ballet offers a meditation on artistry, love, sacrifice, and the cost of greatness, inviting audiences to experience Callas not only as the voice of the twentieth century but as a woman whose passion and fragility remain timeless.