Biography
Brian Michael Müller is an independent academic and PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town, working at the intersection of queer studies, visual culture, and the politics of post-apartheid South Africa.
Brian Michael Müller is an independent academic and PhD candidate in the School for African & Gender Studies, Anthropology & Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. His research examines queer subjectivity, state violence, and visual culture in South Africa, with particular attention to performance art, photography, and the afterlives of apartheid-era policing. Drawing on critical semiotics, phenomenology, and auto-ethnography, his work reads contemporary artistic interventions — most extensively those of Athi-Patra Ruga — as sites where the promises and failures of the constitutional settlement are made visible. Born in Johannesburg under apartheid and living in democratic South Africa, he writes as both scholar and situated witness.
On the practice of scholarship
I write from where I stand. My scholarship proceeds from the conviction that careful description and close reading are political acts — that taking an image, a building, or a performance seriously is a way of taking seriously the lives entangled with it. I am suspicious of the view from nowhere. Auto-ethnography, for me, is not a departure from rigour but a way of naming the situated knowledge every scholar already brings. Whether the object is a photograph by Athi-Patra Ruga or a police station in central Johannesburg, the aim is the same: an account that is honest about its position, patient with its material, and willing to unsettle the stories we prefer to tell.
Degrees
- PhD in African & Gender Studies (in progress)University of Cape Town · Cape Town, South Africa
Dissertation on queer subjectivity, state violence, and the visual archive of the Johannesburg Central Police Station.
- MA (with Distinction), Gender StudiesUniversity of Cape Town · Cape Town, South Africa
Thesis on performance art, queer visibility, and post-apartheid public space.
- BA (Hons), History of Art & Gender StudiesUniversity of the Witwatersrand · Johannesburg, South Africa
Academic appointments
- PhD Candidate, School for African & Gender Studies, Anthropology & LinguisticsUniversity of Cape Town · Cape Town, South Africa
- Independent AcademicCape Town · Cape Town, South Africa
Professional societies
- Member
- Member
- Member