People at WISER

Professor 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...

Shireen is a Professor of Politics at Wits.  She has been seconded to WISER for a period of three years from the Department of Political Studies.  She is co-editor of many books and author of Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (2006), which won the...

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor of African Literature at Wits and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. Over the last two decades, she has pioneered research on global, oceanic and transnational forms of literary and cultural history that seek to understand Africa’s place in the...

Pamila Gupta is Associate Professor at WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Columbia University. Her research explores Lusophone (post)colonial links and...

Victoria Collis Buthelezi holds a joint appointment at PARI (Public Affairs Research Institute) and WiSER, dividing her time between both Institutes, as part of an exciting new collaboration. She will also lead the South African programme of the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s recently launched...

Sarah is a Senior Researcher at WiSER, and holds a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research is on histories of childhood, sexuality, and medicine in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa. Funded by a prestigious, five-year Research Career Advancement Fellowship from the...