Nadia Kamies graduated from the University of Cape Town with a BSc degree in Occupational Therapy in 1984. She has worked extensively with children in hospital, school and private practice settings. In 2013 she returned to university to complete an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town, driven by her commitment to telling stories as a way of addressing the injustices of the past. This led to her being awarded a PhD in Historical and Heritage Studies from the University of Pretoria in April 2019.
Her areas of focus are slavery, apartheid and racism and how they continue to inform the present. In her thesis, Shame and Respectability: A Narrative Enquiry into Cape Town’s ‘Coloured’ Families through Photographs, Cultural Practices and Oral Histories (c. 1950 to 2016), she investigates the notion of ‘colouredness’ in South Africa by thinking through representation and attendant ideas of shame and respectability.
Image by Peartree
