Prof Harris is the incumbent holder of the Follet Chair, which is a prestigious appointment of the highest academic honour bestowed by the Dominican University’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science upon a master researcher and scholar who has achieved renown in the profession. The Follett Chair is selected annually owing to a person’s outstanding teaching ability and superior scholarly achievement. The Dominican University and the Follett Corporation established this position in 2002.
In the annual lecture, Prof Harris described “memory work” as being the centre of his social activism and intellectual rigour that he pursues in South Africa: “In the 1980s, as the struggles against South Africa’s apartheid system unfolded into an endgame, I came to appreciate the power of memory as an instrument of resistance to the systemic forgetting and other forms of erasure deployed by oppressive regimes”.
He problematized the remembering-forgetting binary, positing a distinction between remembering and remembrancing, and asked how healing can be enabled. “I’m suggesting an extraordinary complexity in this realm we call memory. Memory is a complex play of remembering, forgetting, imagining and narrativizing”, he said.
Prof Harris has been the archivist for the papers of Nelson Mandela since 2004, as Head of the Memory Programme at the Nelson Mandela Foundation's Centre of Memory and Dialogue. Before that, he had worked for South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 2018, he was appointed as Adjunct Professor in the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) at Nelson Mandela University.
The annual lecture was attended by academics, students, and members of the River Forest community in Chicago. Harris has been a visiting professor at the Dominican University in Chicago during its 2018-9 academic year. He also presented a short course on archives, ran a workshop on truth commissions, and taught a few classes at the university.