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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

Johannes 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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...