People at WISER
Former PhD student
I began my PhD in mid-2013, based at Wiser and the History Department of Wits University. My interests lie broadly in the political economy of infrastructural development in Africa. Previous research involved the changing economic complexion of the small town of Mokopane in the Limpopo province...
moreFormer PhD student
Robyn Bloch is doing a PhD in English Literature as a doctoral researcher at WiSER. Her work looks into apartheid perpetrator narratives published after 2010 to try to understand how these (mostly) men are being represented — what is included and what is left out of these narratives. Can...
morePost-Doctorate Fellow
Melanie Boehi is a historian interested in multispecies history, plants, gardens, museums, the formation of archives, and journalism....
moreProfessor
Formerly the Head of the School of Social Sciences and then Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) of the University of the Witwatersrand, Professor Belinda Bozzoli is the author of three single-authored, internationally published books and editor or co-editor of a further four; and the author of 26...
moreFormer medical humanities lead
Catherine Burns was educated at WITS, the Johns Hopkins University, and Northwestern University, where she earned her PhD in History. Her research interests focus on medical and health history, the history and ethnography of reproduction and sex, ethics in biomedical research, and the history of...
morePost-Doctoral Fellow
Grieve Chelwa is an inaugural postdoctoral fellow in economics at the Centre for African Studies at Harvard University. Dr. Chelwa has wide-ranging research interests including research on the economics of education in Zambia, the economics of tobacco control in African countries and a recent...
moreSenior Researcher
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...
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Caio Simões de Araújo is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic
Research (WiSER), at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Before joining WiSER, he held research positions at the Centre for Indian Studies in...
Senior Researcher
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...
morePost-Doctoral Fellow
Mekonnen Firew is a legal scholar and postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for African Studies at Harvard University. In addition to designing and teaching a course on 'Law and Development in Contemporary Africa” at the Harvard Law School during this Fall 2016 semester, he completed two...
moreResearch Associate
Zoe Groves received a PhD in history from Keele University in 2011. There she also obtained a BA Hons in International History and Philosophy (2004) and an MRes in African History (2005). Her PhD thesis examined the social, cultural and political lives of ‘Nyasas’ (Malawians) situating them...
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Liz has recently co-edited a book on Radio in Africa, and is currently completing a monograph on the subject which is entitled “Sounding the Present: Radio in Difficult Times.” She has been working under the rubric of ‘Passages of Culture’, a project in terms of which she supervises two doctoral...
morePhD Student
Candice Jansen is a curator and documentarian interested in small histories, biographical inquiries, and African imagination. She is pursuing her doctoral studies in the History of Art as an Archibald Mafeje Scholar at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. Her last exhibition ...
moreFormer PhD student
Christi obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in Anthropology and Philosophy, from the North West University in 2009. She went on to complete an honours degree in Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. In 2011 she completed her Master of Arts degree in Anthropology at the...
moreJohannes Machinya is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow co-hosted by the African Studies Center (ASC) at the University of Michigan and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was also a Mellon Doctoral Fellow at the Wits History Workshop...
moreWriting Fellow
Bongani Madondo is a cultural theorist, race matters critic, public arts curator, and journalist by training.The author most recently of Sigh, the Beloved County: Rock n Roll & Other Stories,a collection of memoirs, travelogues, long form narrative and essays on subjects as diverse...
moreFormer PhD student
Kalema Masua received his M.A. in History from the University of Kinshasa in 2011 under the supervision of Professor Dr. Jean-Marie Mutamba Makombo. Nancy Rose Hunt of the University of Michigan has been an informal mentor for about six years. In the fall of 2010, Kalema presented a paper about...
moreResearch Associate
My research interests centre around, provocatively, ‘the transformative potential of cities’. I use numerous entry points into this area of research. The first one is livelihoods, through which I examine how ordinary people use the city’s resources to reshape their lives within the context of...
morePostdoctoral Fellow
Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh is a Postdoctoral Fellow at WiSER. His first book, Democracy and Delusion: 10 Myths in South African Politics (2017) won the City Press-Tafelberg Nonfiction Award. The book was accompanied by a rap album of the same name. In 2015, he was awarded an MPhil...
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Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a writer, editor and scholar from Zimbabwe working at the intersection of art, design and technology. He holds a PhD in English...
moreFormer Writing Fellow
Neo Muyanga is a composer and librettist. Born in Soweto, Johannesburg, he is the co-founder of the Pan African Space Station and is currently working on a libretto which re-imagines South African protest music in the present.
Elizabeth Nansubuga is a Demographer, holds a PhD in Demography/ Population Studies & is faculty at Makerere University, Uganda. I have a keen interest in civil registration and vital statistics systems in Africa. As an IUSSP Population, Ethics & Human Rights fellow, I focus on the...
moreResearcher
Ashlee received her MA in Literature from the University of Natal, Durban, and her PhD, in 2005, from the University of London, where she studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies. In 2011, her first book, Stranger at Home: The Praise Poet in Apartheid South Africa, appeared...
moreFormer WiSER Director; Professor of Sociology at UCT
Deborah Posel was the founding Director of WISER in 2000. She was educated at the University of Witwatersrand and Nuffield College, Oxford. She has written and published widely on aspects of South African politics and society during and beyond the apartheid years –...
moreDoctoral Fellow
Ruth Sacks is a visual artist and doctoral fellow at WiSER. The working title of her PhD is 'Congo Style: How the Congo influenced Modernism, from Art Nouveau to l'authenticité in the postcolony.' This traces representations of the Congo in early Belgian modernist design, through 20th century...
moreFormer Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Rachel Sandwell is a historian of southern Africa, whose work focuses on gender, race, and the politics of resistance in South Africa. She received her PhD from McGill University in 2015. She is currently a Fonds québécois de recherche - société et culture (FQRSC)-...
moreFormer Postdoctoral Fellow
Kirk was educated in the United States and France, and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Trained primarily as a literary scholar, Kirk’s dissertation explores the relationship between literature, anthropology and the visual arts, and locates African forms...
morePost-Doctoral Research Fellow
Born in Egypt, Amir Allam Taha studied English Literature in Cairo, and moved to Germany in 2003. In 2011, finished his Masters of International Literatures at the Tübingen University with the topic:...
moreFormer PhD Fellow
Ellison Tjirera is a Namibian by birth. He holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Namibia (2012). Tjirera has been a Research Associate at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a Windhoek-based think tank since 2009 when he co-authored Not Speaking Out: Measuring National...
moreFormer PhD Fellow
Natasha Vally is a PhD Fellow at WiSER. Her research on social assistance in South Africa is an ethnographic project with a view to unravel the underlying significant theoretical implications embedded in all levels of application for, and delivery of, state social grants. When she was still a...
morePhD student
Renée van der Wiel is studying towards a PhD in anthropology, and is a doctoral fellow in the medical humanities programme at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WISER). Her PhD research investigates doctor-researchers bridging patient care and knowledge making in the...
moreAssistant Professor
Antina von Schnitzler is a Research Associate at WiSER. Trained as an anthropologist, her research has focused on citizenship and political subjectivities, the anthropology of infrastructure and technology, urban ecologies, postcoloniality and questions of time and temporality. Her first book...
moreResearch Associate
Timothy Wright is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Bilkent University, Ankara, and a Research Associate at WISER. He studies contemporary literature, culture, and film. Broadly, he is interested in how people imagine life amidst ruin, be it...
Professor
Pamila Gupta is 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)...
Associate Professor
Nolwazi Mkhwanazi is a medical anthropologist who is interested in issues relating to gender and the politics of reproduction. She received her PhD from Cambridge University. Nolwazi teaches courses in the anthropology of medicine and the body; medical anthropology; and ethnographic writing and...
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