Dr Amanda Tumusiime

Research Associate

Amanda Tumusiime (Senior Research Associate with the NRF/DST SARChI research programme in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa, Fine Art Department, Rhodes University, South Africa) is a painter, feminist, activist and art historian. She is an Associate Professor in
the Department of Visual Communication and Multimedia at Makerere University, Uganda and teaches Art History and Visual Culture. She is also currently Dean of the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts.

She obtained a bachelor’s degree in Industrial and Fine Arts (BIFA) and an MA (Fine Art) from Makerere University, an MA (Arts) from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in the Department of Art History, and a Doctor of Literature and Philosophy (DLitt et Phil) in History of Art from the University of South Africa. She is a Presidential Fellow of the African Studies Association, a Fulbright Scholar, a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and a Fellow of the Carnegie Next Generation of African Academics, and Maya Angelou recipient.

Her research interests cut across feminism, art history activism and art practice, and art and health. This multi-disciplinary focus enables her to examine the way in which patriarchal perceptions influence the images through which young girls, grass-roots women, the deaf, and the elderly are ‘othered’ in cultural discourses expressed through the medium of art and other forms of culture. Tumusiime advocates the inclusion of these marginalised vulnerable groups. Through her art practice, she has put up seven solo art exhibitions, has participated in over 35 group shows, and has been published in the African Arts Journal, Start Journal CPAN, and Humanities Review Journal of Delta State University, Abraka, Nigeria.

Dr. Tumusiime has received numerous collaborative awards and grants from various sources, e.g. from the African Studies Association as an ASA Presidential Fellow hosted at Princeton University, as a Fulbright African Research Scholar at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, as a Fellow of the Carnegie Next Generation of African Academics (NGAA II) at Makerere University, and as a Fellow of the American Council for Learned Societies –African Humanities Program (AHP), Carnegie Corporation of New York, hosted at Rhodes University.

She has received grants from Huawei Technologies Uganda, Mobile Telephone Network Uganda (MTN) and M-KOPA Uganda. She has also received a SIDA-SAREC grant from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries (SAREC), under the Makerere University Staff Development Fund, and twice received a postgraduate merit award from the University of the Witwatersrand. Furthermore, she has received a prize from the University Association of Women Makerere as the best female art student at the undergraduate level as well as an award from the International Red Crescent Movement Expo’92 in Seville, Spain, and a MAK-SIDA Research Training Programme award.

As the current Dean of the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Art (MTSIFA) and Head of the Department of Sculpture and Drawing (2010–2011) as well as Head of the Department of Visual, Communication, Design and Multimedia (2020–2022), she has demonstrated her leadership abilities. She has also provided a conducive environment for the faculty and students to excel in their learning, innovation and research activities. As the liaison person for Chinmaya Education Institution in India and Makerere University (2023), she organises talks for the students through His Holiness Swami Swaroopananda. As the Secretary for the Deans Forum Makerere University (2022), she handles the forum’s administrative issues whose focus is on building institutional capacity and the management of sponsored research and urging the Deans, as academic leaders, to be at the forefront of setting the research agenda and priorities in their faculties.

Associate Professor Amanda Tumusiime has been invited as an assessor for applications in the African Humanities Program (AHP) postdoctoral fellowship competition (2021) to apply her high standard of expertise in promoting quality research, is a Reviewer for the National Research Foundation (NRF), South Africa (2020) and the African Humanities Program Assessor for the American Council for Learned Societies (2020).


In recent years Ms Tumusiime has founded various research initiatives, projects and networks. Her interest in exploring possible linkages between health and art networks have produced outputs in which art is related to medicine, culminating in the Art and the Brain Exhibition (2022), Rethinking Art in Deaf Culture (2016 to the present), Visions and Revisions: Rewriting Histories of Phenomenal Women in Kigezi (2017), Re-Engaging Grass-roots Women into Contemporary Global Economies for Empowerment (2015 to the present), Self-Realisation through Rewriting Their History (2015 to the present), Using Art to Fundraise for Girls’ Education, Laying Strategies for Keeping Girls in School (2016 to the present), Unveiling Ageist Stereotypes: Of Elderly and Aging as Ferocious, Dangerous, Weird and Pervasive: Reclaiming Their Subjectivity (2017). She has done this in an era where the young generation is making propaganda through art and other forms of culture that the old should be secluded, excluded, and marginalised. Dr. Tumusiime is interested in interrogating these contemporary stereotypical representations of the elderly and old age, hence reclaiming their subjectivity.

 

 

PUBLICATIONS AND EXHIBITIONS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Modified: Fri, 08 Mar 2024 12:06:59 SAST