Joel Cabrita
Associate Professor of African History | Stanford University
Joel Cabrita is Associate Professor of African History and (by courtesy) of Religious Studies. She is also the Susan Ford Dorsey Director of the Center for African Studies. She is the author of three books and numerous articles on religion, gender, and the politics of knowledge production in Africa. Her most recent book , Written Out: The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala, tells the story of a forgotten South African writer, exploring the processes by which certain figures achieve fame and others are erased and ignored. Cabrita is currently collaborating with the South African photographer, Sabelo Mlangeni, who will be a visitor at Stanford in 2023- 2024 and whose work will be exhibited on campus. Cabrita’s teaching at Stanford includes courses on the history of publishing in Africa, the rise of radical religious movements on the continent, and the intersection between gender and biographical practices.
Jacob S. T. Dlamini
Associate Professor of History | Princeton University
Jacob Dlamini studies the ancient, colonial and postcolonial history of southern Africa. He works also on the comparative history of national parks and his publications include Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park (Ohio University Press, 2020) and The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police (Harvard University Press, 2020).
Wayne Dooling
Senior Lecturer in the History of Southern Africa | Chair, Centre of African Studies | SOAS, University of London
Wayne Dooling is a graduate of the Universities of Cape Town and Cambridge. He is the author of Slavery, emancipation and colonial rule in South Africa (2007) and Law and community in a slave society: Stellenbosch District, South Africa (1992). He is a former editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies and is currently a senior lecturer in African History at SOAS, University of London, where he also chairs the Centre for African Studies.
Geraldine Frieslaar
Curator of Research, Dialogue and Social Justice | Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Geraldine Frieslaar obtained her Ph.D in History at the University of the Western Cape in 2016. Currently she is the Curator of Research, Dialogue and Social Justice at the Stellenbosch University Museum, where her work is on focused research around the museum’s collections and developing content, the development and facilitation of academic seminars and conversations and the development of new collections and exhibitions on the themes of social justice. Frieslaar has worked in various positions in the last 15 years at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre, the District Six Museum, the Robben Island Museum and the South African History Archive. Through her work experience and academic research, Frieslaar cultivates an understanding of historic and systemic challenges facing archival and museological spaces and is interested in interventions that disrupt traditional modes of knowing and making them more accessible, dialogical, participatory, and inclusive.
Carolyn Hamilton
Professor, South African Research Professor in Archive and Public Culture | University of Cape Town
Professor Carolyn Hamilton is the South African Research Chair in Archive and Public Culture at the University of Cape Town. Her initial work on the history of pre-industrial southern Africa prompted her early interrogation of the notion of archive, and her turn to questions of critical method. These concerns underpin her interest in roles and forms of public deliberation and of public institutions concerned with history and culture in increasingly unsettled democracies, and the operations of power in and through archives. Her publications include Terrific Majesty: the Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Invention (1998, Harvard), co-editorship of the Cambridge History of South Africa (2012), and of collections of essays including Babel Unbound: Rage, Reason and Revolutions in Public Life (2020, Wits University Press); Tribing and Untribing the Archive (2 vols. 2016. UKZN Press); Uncertain Curature: In and out of the Archive (2014, Jacana); Refiguring the Archive (2002, Kluwer) and The Mfecane Aftermath (1995, Wits University Press). She is the director of the Five Hundred Year Archive, a digital humanities project. A former trustee of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, she has been a founding board member of a number of activist archives and has experience in the production of Open Reports on topics of public concern.
Shireen Hassim
Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics | Carleton University, Canada
Shireen Hassim is Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, and Visiting Professor, WiSER, Wits University. She has written and edited several books including No Shortcuts to Power: Women and Policymaking in Africa, Women’s Organisations and Democracy: Contesting Authority and Go Home or Die Here: Violence, Xenophobia and the Politics of Difference in South Africa. Her interests lie in feminist theory and politics, collective action and histories of mobilization of women in Africa, and social policies and gender. Her most recent book was an archival recuperation of the work of the South African sociologist, Fatima Meer.
Jill E. Kelly
Associate Professor and Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor History | Southern Methodist University
Jill E. Kelly is Associate Professor of History at Southern Methodist University and Honorary Research Associate at the University of Cape Town. She is the author of To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Authority, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800-1996 (Michigan State University Press, 2018; University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2019). Her research has been supported by an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship (2015), the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad fellowship (2010), and a Fulbright Scholar Award (2018-2019). Her work has appeared in African Historical Review, African Studies Review, History in Africa, and Journal of Southern African Studies, among others. She writes about gender, violence, and traditional authority. Her current manuscript is an intellectual history of women’s anti-apartheid activism.
Lindie Koorts
University of the Free State, South Africa
Lindie Koorts is a historian and biographer, with a focus on 20th century South Africa, Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid. She wrote the first comprehensive post-1994 biography of an apartheid leader, and in recent years has published a number of contributions on the historiography of South African biography.
Rebekah Lee
Associate Professor | University of Oxford
Rebekah Lee is Associate Professor in African Studies at the University of Oxford. Rebekah’s research concerns the social and cultural history of modern South Africa, and latterly more broadly the history of health and medicine in sub-Saharan Africa. Interdisciplinarity is a core pre-occupation and intellectual orientation – her research explores the productive interface of history with other disciplinary traditions, most prominently anthropology but also the fields of urban studies, development studies, human geography and public health. Rebekah has published on gender, migration, urbanisation, religion, health and the family, including the books Health, Healing and Illness in African History (Bloomsbury, 2021) and African Women and Apartheid: Migration and Settlement in Urban South Africa (I.B. Tauris, 2009). She is Editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies and a Council member of the Royal Historical Society. Rebekah has held visiting fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute (Harvard) and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies. In 2013 she received the Richard Werbner Prize for Visual Ethnography from the Royal Anthropological Institute for her documentary film, ‘The Price of Death’. Rebekah is completing her third book, Death and Memory in Modern South Africa, a culmination of over 15 years of research on the changing meaning and management of death in transitional and post-apartheid South Africa. She is also undertaking a new research project, on road safety and road danger in Africa.
Athambile Masola
University of Cape Town
Dr Athambile Masola received her PhD from Rhodes University. Her dissertation was an exploration of black women’s life writing with a particular focus on Noni Jabavu and Sisonke Msimang’s memoirs. Her primary research focuses on black women’s life writing and historiography. Her research is also informed by the early 20th century newspaper archive in South Africa (particularly written in isiXhosa). She is primarily concerned with the nature of erasure and the ways in which multiple forms of reading a variety of texts can inform archival research.
Noor Nieftagodien
Professor of History & The South African Research Chair in Local Histories | University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Noor Nieftagodien is a Professor of History, the South African Research Chair in Local Histories and the Head of the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is the co-author, with Phil Bonner, of books on township histories Alexandra – A History and Kathorus – A History and urban history Ekurhuleni – The Making of an Urban Region. He has also published books on student politics The Soweto Uprising and Students Must Rise and co-edited books on liberation movements, One Hundred Years of the ANC – Debating Liberation Histories Today and the forthcoming Labour Struggles in Southern Africa, 1919-1949: New Perspective on the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union. His current Public History projects are on the Congress of South African Students and the South African Council on Sport, respectively the leading high school student and sports movement in the struggle against apartheid. The History Workshop is also a partner in various community history and archives projects, which focus on co-producing histories (collecting of life history interviews, exhibitions, websites and publications) and recently launched the Soweto History and Archives Project.
Sanele Ntshingana
Lecturer | University of Cape Town
Sanele KaNtshingana is a lecturer in the Department of African Languages and Literatures at the University of Cape Town. His current doctoral research in historical studies is titled “The Conceptual History and the Praxis of Umbuso Through the Eyes of Amathwasa Oncwadi in the Southeast African Region (c1838-c1918)” and it maps out how amaXhosa’s political life and ideas of umbuso/rule in the ‘deep’ past were discursively maneuvered and shaped by African intellectuals in the vernacular press and other Black registrars in the early nineteenth and early twentieth century. Sanele considers himself an ‘undisciplined’ young scholar who straddles History, Language, and Education, inside and outside the academy.
Tinashe Nyamunda
Associate Professor | University of Pretoria, South Africa
Tinashe Nyamunda is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies. His main research interests are in the Financial, Economic and Social History of the late 19th, 20th and 21st century. He has published in regional and international journals and serves as one of the Associate Editors of Historia and sit on the advisory board of the Manchester University Press.
Derek Peterson
Ali Mazrui Collegiate Professor of History and African Studies | University of Michigan
Derek Peterson is a historian of eastern Africa’s intellectual and political cultures. He’s the author of the photographic book, The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin: photographs from the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (Prestel, 2021); and co-editor of The Politics of Heritage in Africa (Cambridge, 2015), together with other works. In 2017 Peterson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He’s currently finishing a book about Idi Amin’s Uganda.
Laura Phillips
Senior Lecturer | North West University, South Africa
Laura Phillips is a Senior Lecturer in the History Subject Group on the Mahikeng Campus at North West University. She has published on questions of migrancy, Bantustans and mining in South Africa and is currently completing a book manuscript on the history of class formation in rural apartheid South Africa. Her current work focuses on South Africa’s economic history and the shifts in South Africa’s political economy.
Karin Shapiro
Associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of African and African American Studies | Duke University
Karin Shapiro is a social historian of South Africa and the American South and is based in the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University. From South Africa, she attended the University of the Witwatersrand and Yale University and has taught at both Wits and Duke. The author of A New South Rebellion: The Battle against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871-96, co-editor of History from South Africa: Alternative Visions and Practices, she has long had a particular interest in the connections between South African and American history. In addition to her written scholarship, she has directed three films: Double Vision, about the South African diaspora in NC, Fulbright Revisited, about the history of the Fulbright Program (of which she was a beneficiary), and John Henry Lives On: Sherman James and the John Henryism Hypothesis, which examined James’ ground-breaking research into the consequence of racial health disparities and its connections to South African social medicine pioneers. Until 2021, she co-edited Safundi. She’s currently working on two projects – a biography of the South African born Archbishop of Central Africa, Khotso Makhulu, and a film about the social medics who came from Pholela to North Carolina in the 1950s and 60s and who worked at the forefront of social epidemiology in the American South.
Stephen Sparks
University of Johannesburg, South Africa
Dr. Stephen Sparks received his doctorate from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and teaches in the Department of History at the University of Johannesburg. His research areas include apartheid South Africa, modernism, nationalism, the history of town planning, the history of science and technology, industrial development, everyday life under apartheid and historiography more generally. He is completing a manuscript entitled Apartheid Modern: Science, Industry and Society in South Africa.
Elizabeth Thornberry
Associate Professor of African History | Johns Hopkins University
Elizabeth Thornberry is a historian of gender and law in Southern Africa and Associate Professor of African History at Johns Hopkins University. Her first book, Colonizing Consent: Rape and Governance in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, traced the entanglement of theories of political and sexual consent under colonial rule. Her current project, tentatively titled “Imaging African Law,” shows how African intellectuals developed and refined their understandings of law and legal practice in response to the incorporation of “native law” within the colonial legal system. Her work has been funded by grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Law and Society Center at the University of Cape Town, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Davis Center for Historical Research at Princeton, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2023-24, she will return to student status and enroll in law school as part of a Mellon New Directions grant.
Janeke Thumbran
Senior Lecturer | Rhodes University, South Africa
Janeke Thumbran is a Senior Lecturer in the History Department at Rhodes University. She has a PhD in African History from the University of Minnesota. Janeke’s research interests include the history of universities and the history of race and ethnicity in South Africa. Her monograph titled “From Stellenbosch to Pretoria: (Re)-Locating the ‘Coloured Question’ (1932-1990)” examines how the ‘coloured question’ shifted epistemologically from the Cape to the Transvaal in the 1960s through the intervention of the disciplines of social work and sociology at Stellenbosch University, and subsequently at the University of Pretoria. Janeke’s second project tracks the emergence of ancestral DNA testing through physical anthropology’s search for human origins in the 1930s. This project questions how the organization of human populations into Haplo groups may reinforce and replicate aspects of the racial typology that accompanied anthropology’s quest in the 1930s. Janeke has published in Social Dynamics, South African Historical Journal and Kronos.
Robert Vinson
Director & Chair, Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American & African Studies | University of Virginia
Robert Trent Vinson is Director & Chair of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American & African Studies at the University of Virginia and a Research Associate at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He is a scholar and teacher of 19th and 20th century African & African Diaspora history, specializing in the transnational connections between southern Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. Vinson’s publications include two books, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of ’American Negro Liberation’ in Segregationist South Africa (2012) and Albert Luthuli: Mandela before Mandela (2018). He has also published many articles, including in the Journal of African History, the African Studies Review, and the Journal of Southern African Studies. Vinson is currently completing two co-authored book projects, Zulu Diasporas: Africa and Africans in Black Nationalist Histories & American Popular Culture (with Benedict Carton) and Crossing the Water: African Americans and South Africa, 1890-1965: A Documentary History. Vinson currently serves as President of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), the world’s premier professional organization of African and African Diaspora scholars. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association and on the editorial board of Michigan State University Press and of Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies.
Vinson earned his Ph.D. in African History from Howard University. Prior to his appointment at UVA, Vinson taught at Washington University in St. Louis and more recently, William & Mary, where he was Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings Professor of History & Africana Studies. At William & Mary, Vinson was also the first Chair of the Lemon Project, which documents, preserves and disseminates scholarship that uncovered the College’s long histories of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.