The scholarships are from the Clarendon Fund (Oxford’s most prestigious internal scholarship programme), the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (the UK’s most competitive national funding scheme), the Lincoln College Kingsgate Fund, and the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust (one of South Africa’s most competitive funding mechanisms for international study).
Besides Oxford, Luan applied to various other university programmes in the UK and the USA, and he was offered a MacCracken Fellowship to study at New York University and the Smuts Cambridge International Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge – both of which are fully funded scholarships.
He decided to return to Oxford, however, primarily to work with Prof Elleke Boehmer, one of the leading thinkers in postcolonial theory and world literature.
His study will focus on the interface between metaethics, desire, and textualisation in relation to the Afrikaans, |xam, and English South African literary, linguistic, and philosophical systems.
He previously completed an MSc in African Studies (cum laude) at Oxford, for which he was awarded the Kirk-Greene Prize for Best Overall Performance, an MA in Philosophy (cum laude) at the University of the Western Cape completed under the supervision of Prof Antjie Krog, and an MA in Linguistics (cum Laude) at Mandela University completed under supervision of Dr Mariana Kriel.
In the past, he has, amongst others, been awarded Mandela University’s Vice-Chancellor’s Excellence Award for the Best Postgraduate Achievement (Social Sciences and Humanities) (2021), a Mandela Rhodes Scholarship (2020) and an Abe Bailey Fellowship (2019).
Research that has flowed from his pen have appeared in numerous Web of Science-indexed journals, including Journal of Southern African Studies, Critical Arts, and the Journal of African Cultural Studies.
He has been affiliated with CriSHET since 2019, where he conducts research on Critical University Studies.
Previously he lectured in the Department of Language and Literature, Department of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, and in the Centre for Philosophy in Africa, and he was Executive Chairperson and Manager of the Nelson Mandela University Choir from 2016 to 2019.