Carina Venter (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)
Project Title
Playing at/against power: Histories of Trauma and Abuse in South African Music-Pedagogical Spaces
STIAS Iso Lomso Fellowship, 2025–26
Senior Lecturer of Music History and Musicology, Stellenbosch University
Social
Carina Venter is an interdisciplinary researcher grounded in the humanities, a writer, and a consultant. She is a senior lecturer in musicology at Stellenbosch University and chair of the South African Society for Research in Music. She holds a doctorate in musicology from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and an MBA from Stellenbosch Business School. Her work brings together cultural history and critical theory, with particular emphasis on music and violence, apartheid histories and aesthetics, critical disability studies, and inclusive innovation.
She is an early career research fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, where she is completing a book on histories of trauma and abuse in South African music pedagogical and music professional spaces. Her research has been published in journals including Social Dynamics, Transformation in Higher Education, and South African Music Studies, and she has coedited a special issue of the Journal of Musicology on music and landscape. In parallel with her academic research, she lectures and consults at the intersection of inclusive innovation and critical disability studies, working with organizations in the corporate and creative sectors to develop access-centered and socially responsive approaches to innovation.
Selected Publications
- Venter, Carina. “On Madness and Eros: Thoughts on an Arrested Present.” Transformation in Higher Education 10 (2025).
- Venter, Carina. “Composition and/as Postcolonial Shame: Rewind, A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony.” Social Dynamics 47, no. 2 (2021): 312–28.
- Venter, Carina. “‘While This Happened Here, That Happened There’: Different Trains, Musical Document and Musical Reality.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 52, no. 1 (2021): 23–38.
- Venter, Carina. “A Catalogue of Seepage: The Political Grammar of Apartheid, Afrikaans Music Historiography & Afrikaner Nationalism.” South African Music Studies 36–37 (2018): 265–90.
- Venter, Carina, William Fourie, Juliana M. Pistorius, and Neo Myanga. “Decolonising Musicology: A Response and Three Positions.” South African Music Studies 36–37 (2018): 129–54.