KAROO NEWS - The Graaff-Reinet Museum is excited to announce that Professor Noëleen Murray will be this year's guest speaker at their Annual General Meeting that will take place on Friday, 5 July at 12:00 at The Old Library Museum on Church Street.

Murray is an architect and academic who has been immersed in debates around heritage and museums across the continent and beyond. She spends time in the Karoo every year as her family is from Graaff-Reinet. 

The title of Murray’s input at the Graaff-Reinet Museum’s AGM is: 'A Karoo Museum'.

As an interdisciplinary scholar and architect based in Africa, Murray has extensive experience in design, research and practice and has led international teams and projects whilst managing substantial research grants. 

Since graduating in 1994, she has been an associate at Design Matters Architects in Cape Town, while holding academic positions at various South African universities, including the Universities of Cape Town, the Western Cape, Witwatersrand, and Pretoria. Since 2014, she has held the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Chair in Critical Architecture and Urbanism, which is the subject of her latest book: Creative Cities in Africa: Critical Architecture and Urbanism (2024). 

She is affiliated with the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, where she leads research on the IDRC-funded project Operationalizing a Just Transition in Africa in collaboration with South North and the Africa Research Impact Network through the Environmental Humanities Research Group. Previously, she was the director of the Wits City Institute at Wits University, Johannesburg, where she also held the Andrew W. Mellon Research Chair.

With architectural degrees (BAS, BArch, MArch) and a PhD in African Studies from the University of Cape Town, Murray has authored key publications including Desire Lines – Space, Memory and Identity in the Postapartheid City (2007), Becoming UWC, Reflections, pathways and the unmaking of apartheid’s legacy (2012), and Hostels, Homes Museum, memorialising migrant labour pasts in Lwandle South Africa (2014), co-authored with Leslie Witz, which received the Michael M. Ames Award for Innovative Museum Anthropology. Her current project focuses on research and partnerships to foster creative practice and interdisciplinary research.

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