Mieke Struwig

Mieke Struwig is a Research Fellow at the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation. She completed her PhD studies in March 2024 under the guidance of Dr Carina Venter and Prof. Stephanus Muller with a dissertation considering the intellectual history of institutionalised music studies in 20th-century South Africa. Mieke’s research engages decolonial thought, intellectual and institutional histories and their relation to discourses of apartheid and colonialism, with a special focus on the intellectual history of South African music studies. Her work appears in Continuum, SAMUS: South African Music Studies, Qualitative Research, Journal of Southern African Studies (forthcoming) and the Tydskrif vir Nederlands en Afrikaans.

Mieke holds a BMus: Performing Arts (Cum Laude) degree from Nelson Mandela University, where she received the Vice-Chancellor’s Medal for the best First-Degree Graduate in the university in 2019. She completed her MMus: Musicology (Cum Laude) in 2020 at Stellenbosch University under the guidance of Dr Carina Venter, with a thesis investigating the decolonisation of the BMus curricula of four South African tertiary music departments. Mieke has lectured on World Music, Musicology (South African Music, 20th-Century Music, and 19th-Century Music), Academic Literacy and Research Methodology at Stellenbosch University and is the current secretary of the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM). 

Publications
  • 2026 ‘Making a Musical Monument: The South African Music Encyclopedia and the Politics of Knowledge’, Journal of Southern African Studies, forthcoming.
  • 2025 ‘Decolonising at the Margins: herri as a Model for Radical Decolonial Publishing’, Continuum 39(4), 660–675.
  • 2025. ‘Jan Bouws, Afrikanernasionalisme en die grense van musiekhistoriografie in Suid-Afrika (Jan Bouws, Afrikaner Nationalism, and the Boundaries of Music Historiography in South Africa)’, Tydskrif vir Nederlands en Afrikaans 32(1), 5–31.
  • 2024 ‘Writing Against the Chain Transmission of Fear: Reflections on Institutionalised Ethics’, Qualitative Research 25(2), 417–435.
  • 2020 ‘Surveying Post-Apartheid Curricular Change at Four South African Tertiary Music Departments’. SAMUS: South African Music Studies 40(1), 419-462. 

Reviews

  • 2025 Review of Playing the Changes. Jazz at an African University and on the Road by Darius Brubeck and Catherine Brubeck. African Music 13(1), 159–163.
  • 2024 Review of Sound Fragments: From Field Recording to African Electronic Stories by Noel Lobley. SAMUS: South African Music Studies 43/44, 298–302.