I enjoy the reading and thinking as well as the discussion and exchange that an academic life involves. I love the smell of old books and newspapers … - Gabeba Baderoon

I love reading and visiting museums and galleries, which is also part of my work. Talking with friends over a home-cooked meal is my favorite way to spend an evening.

In August 1996, while I was a Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town, I was struck by a series of news stories in South African newspapers in which the visual and verbal imagery seemed to me highly distinctive. I kept a collection of clippings and eventually these became the basis for my PhD on images of Islam. In the course of my studies, I conducted archival research into colonial-era paintings, newspapers and popular cultures in South Africa, and read these in juxtaposition with contemporary literary representations of Islam. This trajectory of images across two centuries became the material for a theory about representations of slavery and Islam in South Africa.

I hope we will have developed partnerships and cooperative relations with scholars in other parts of the world, especially in the Global South. For me, such pooling of intellectual and material resources will generate new and necessary ways of engaging with the world's challenges.