Heidi Grunebaum

Heidi Grunebaum is former director of the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR), University of the Western Cape, where she is a writer and scholar working on the research theme, ‘Aesthetics and Politics’. Grunebaum’s work focuses on public and aesthetic responses to the afterlives of genocide, partition, and mass violence, specifically in relation to apartheid, the Holocaust and the Palestine Nakba. Her research interests include comparative genocide studies, critical memory studies, postcolonial theory and public culture. Grunebaum is the author of the monograph, Memorializing the Past: Everyday Life in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2011), co-editor of Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive (2012) and Athlone in Mind (2017). With Mark J. Kaplan, Grunebaum made the feature-length documentary film The Village Under the Forest (2013) and The Return (2024).