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Director |
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| Senior Researchers |
[
Prof. Jonathan Hyslop
] [ Dr Achille Mbembe ] [ Dr Sarah Nutall ] |
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| Research Officers |
[
Irma du Plessis ] [ Tom Odhiambo ] [ Graeme Reid ] |
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| Postdoctoral Fellow |
[ Dr Tina Sideris ] | |
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Tel:+27
117174223 |
•
Professor Deborah Posel completed a D. Phil
at Nuffield College, University of Oxford in 1987, where she was also
a Gwilyn Gibbon Prize Research Fellow. Following a research position in
the African Studies Institute at Wits, she joined the Department of Sociology
in 1990 where she remained for ten years, working her way up to Associate
Professor. During 1994/5, she was a visiting scholar in the Department
of Sociology at the Harvard University. She took up her position as Director
of WISER in July 2000 and in August 2000 was made Ad Hominem Professor
of Sociology. She has written extensively on the history of apartheid,
including The Making of Apartheid 1948 to 1961: Conflict and Compromise
(Clarendon Press, 1991 & 1997) and Apartheid’s Genesis, co- edited
with P. Bonner and P. Delius (WUP & Ohio, 1994). More recent work
focuses on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which
has produced a co-edited book on Commissioning the Truth: the South African
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the politics of sexuality and
death in the midst of HIV/AIDS. |
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Tel:+27
117174272 |
•
Prof. Jonathan Hyslop received MA degrees
from the University of Oxford and the University of Birmingham, and a
Ph.D from the University of the Witwatersrand. Currently he is an Associate
Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand
and is on secondment to WISER. He has published numerous articles
on aspects of 20th century South African social history and is the author
of The Classroom Struggle: Policy and Resistance in South Africa 1940-1990
(Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, 1999) and editor of African
Democracy in the Era of Globalisation (Johannesburg, University of the
Witwatersrand Press, 1999). His recent research has been around issues
of race in 20th century South Africa. He is currently completing
a biography of the Scottish/South African trade unionist, James Thompson
Bain. He is commencing a study of patronage politics in contemporary
Southern Africa. |
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Tel:+27
117174225 |
• Dr Achille Mbembe, born in Cameroon, obtained his Ph.D in History at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). He was Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, New York, from 1988-1991, a Senior Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., from 1991 to 1992, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania from 1992 to 1996, Executive Director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) in Dakar, Senegal, from 1996 to 2000. Achille was also a visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001, and a visiting Professor at Yale University in 2003. He has written extensively in African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996). His latest work On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation has been published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001.
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Tel:+27
117174231 |
•
Dr Sarah Nuttall, a
South African Rhodes Scholar, obtained her D.Phil at Oxford in 1994 and
lectured in English at the University of Stellenbosch from 1997 to 2001.
She was a Visiting Professor at the Institute for English and American
Studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria, from March to June 2000,
a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of African American Studies
at the University of California, Berkeley, from January to March 2001,
and a Visiting Professor in English and African American Studies at Yale
University from September to December 2003. She is co-editor of: Text,
Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia
(Rautledge, 1996); Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South
Africa (OUP, 1998); and Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies
(OUP, 2000), editor of Beauty and Ugliness: African and Diaspora Aesthetics
(2004) and author of a forthcoming volume of essays on South African Literatures. |
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Tel:+27
117174221 |
•
Irma du Plessis obtained her B.A. at the University
of Pretoria in 1993. She then completed an interdisciplinary B.A. (Honours)
in Philosophy and Afrikaans from the same university, and was awarded
an Abe Bailey Overseas Scholarship. This was followed by a second Honours
degree in Industrial Sociology at RAU in 2000 and an M.A. in Literary
Theory through the University of Pretoria in 2002. Prior to joining WISER,
she worked for the South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE). |
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Tel:+27
117174232 |
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Tom Odhiambo is currently registered for a PhD
in African Literature in the School of Literature and Language Studies,
University of the Witwatersrand. His current research interest is in the
area of popular culture and literature in Africa, with a focus on Kenyan
popular literature. The title of his doctoral thesis, which is scheduled
for completion in 2003, is “The (Un)Popularity of Kenyan Popular Fiction:
The Case of David Maillu”. He obtained an M.A in African Literature at
the University of the Witwatersrand in 2001. For the M.A he researched
Kenyan fiction by women writers. Before coming to Wits, he had graduated
with a Bachelor of Education at Moi University, in Kenya, in 1998, after
which he taught English language and literature at secondary school level
for two years. |
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Tel:+27
117174227 |
•
Graeme Reid did a B.A. at Wits, followed by
a B.A. (Honours) in African Literature and an M.A. in Social Anthropology,
which he completed in 1999. He established the Gay and Lesbian Archives
(GALA) at Wits in 1997 and was the Director until 2001, when he joined
WISER. His Masters research looked at the intersection of race, class
and sexuality on a Pentecostal church community in Johannesburg. Other
research projects have been documented on video. He was co-director of
a video called Dark and Lovely, Soft and Free, which tells the story of
gay life in small towns and rural areas of South Africa through the lens
of the hair saloon. His doctoral research, which he is undertaking at
the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research is concerned with social
anxieties and political tensions relating to sexuality in contemporary
South Africa. His fieldwork focuses on hair saloons and beauty pageants
in Mpumalanga. |
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Tel:+27
117174228 |
• Dr Tina Sideris completed a degree in Industrial Sociology and was awarded a British Council Bursary to study at Essex University, under Paul Thompson, where she completed a research paper on recording living memory in South Africa. On completion of her MA in clinical psychology at Wits University, Tina took up the post of community counsellor at the Wits Counselling and Careers Unit. Her doctoral research, conducted through RAU, examined the psycho-social sequelae of war for Mozambican women survivors who fled to border villages in the Nkomazi region. In the course of doing fieldwork for her PhD, it became evident to Tina that domestic violence and rape were dominant features of life for local women living in the Nkomazi. In 1994, Tina and a colleague from the Nkomazi, Rachel Nsimbini Nkosi, founded the Masisukumeni Women’s Crisis Centre. From its humble beginnings, Masisukumeni now employs 14 local women who provide counselling and medico-legal assistance to an average of 1 300 survivors of gender specific violence a year. The questions of how men come to contemplate non-violent gender relations and how they sustain non-violent practices - in communities where levels of domestic violence are alarmingly high and are justified by prevailing notions of gender and masculinity - form the subject of Tina’s theoretical and field work as a postdoctoral fellow at WISER. |
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[
hoffmanm@wiser.wits.ac.za
]
for comments and updates |
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