Meet the JIAS Advisory Board
In 2020, a new Advisory Board (AB) was appointed to provide oversight and strategic guidance on the mandate and activities of JIAS. Led by the former President of the Republic of South Africa, Mr. Kgalema Motlanthe, members of the AB are drawn from various academic disciplines and sectors of society from South Africa and abroad. They include physicists, engineers, mathematicians, historians, novelists, poets, social scientists, and business and social entrepreneurs. The University of Johannesburg is immensely grateful that they have agreed to dedicate their precious time to provide their expertise, wisdom, leadership and vision to JIAS. The members of the AB are the following:
Meet the JIAS Professors
Professor Chris Brink
Professor Chris Brink
Professor Chris Brink served as Vice-Chancellor of Newcastle University in the UK from 2007 till 2016. He was a Board member of the Russell Group, as well as the N8, the partnership of eight research-intensive universities in the North of England, which he also chaired. Previously he had served as a Board member of Universities UK (where he chaired the Student Policy Network), the national Equality Challenge Unit (also as Co-Chair), the national Quality Assurance Agency, JISC (the national digital services provider), the Advisory Committee on Leadership, Governance and Management of HEFCE, the North East Local Enterprise Partnership, and various regional Boards. Currently he serves on the University Grants Committee in Hong Kong, where he chairs the implementation group for the 2020 Research Assessment Exercise.
Professor Julia Gallagher
Professor Julia Gallagher
Julia Gallagher is a Professor in African Politics. Her research explores citizens’ conceptions of statehood and state-society relations, combining political, social, aesthetic and psychoanalytic theory with extensive fieldwork. She has written on UK-African relations, Images of Africa and Zimbabwean conceptions of the state in relation to the wider world. Julia leads an ERC-funded project on architecture and statehood in Africa. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg, a member of the Editorial Board of African Affairs and a member of the Advisory Board of the John and Elnora Ferguson Centre for African Studies, University of Bradford. She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Professor Vincent Maphai
Professor Vincent Maphai
Vincent Maphai is the chairman of Discovery Foundation and a non-executive Board member of the Discovery Holdings. Formerly he was Chairman of BHP Billiton, Southern Africa, and executive director of the South African Breweries. Professor Maphai joined the private sector in 1998 after an academic career spanning more than two decades. He taught locally at the Universities of Transkei, Witwatersrand, Western Cape, Cape Town and Pretoria. He holds degrees from the Universities of Natal, UNISA and the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He also participated in the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School. The University of Pretoria awarded him a degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Honoris Causa in 2007. He has held various teaching and research fellowships at institutions abroad, including Oxford, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford. Among various public policy roles, he chaired the Council of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, was appointed Chairman of the Presidential Review Commission by President Mandela, and served as Chairman of the South African Broadcasting Corporation by President Mbeki.
Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is Professor, founding Head of Archie Mafeje Research Institute for Applied Social Policy (AMRI) and currently Acting Executive Director of the Change Management Unit (CMU) in the Vice-Chancellor’s Office at the University of South Africa (UNISA). He is also the founder of the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN) based in at the University of South Africa. He is a National Research Foundation (NRF) rated social scientist; a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf); a Fellow of African Studies Centre (ASC) in the Netherlands; and a Research Associate at the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies at The Open University in the United Kingdom. Professor Ndlovu-Gatsheni has published over a hundred publications and his major publications include The Ndebele Nation: Reflections on Hegemony, Memory and Historiography (Amsterdam & Pretoria: Rosenberg Publishers & UNISA Press, 2009); Do ‘Zimbabweans’ Exist? Trajectories of Nationalism, National Identity Formation and Crisis in a Postcolonial State (Oxford & Bern: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2009); Redemptive or Grotesque Nationalism? Rethinking Contemporary Politics in Zimbabwe (Oxford & Bern: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2011); Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity (New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, June 2013); Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2013); Nationalism and National Projects in Southern Africa: New Critical Reflections (Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, 2013); Bondage of Boundaries and Identity Politics in Postcolonial Africa: The ‘Northern Problem’ and Ethno-Futures (Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, 2013); Mugabeism? History, Politics and Power in Zimbabwe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, August 2015); Decolonizing the University, Knowledge Systems and Disciplines (North Carolina, Carolina Academic Press, April 2016); The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and Politics of Life (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, March 2016); Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo of Zimbabwe: Politics, Power and Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; and Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (London & New York: Routledge, July 2018).
Professor Pier Paolo Frassinelli
Professor Pier Paolo Frassinelli
Pier Paolo Frassinelli is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Johannesburg. He has a laurea (summa cum laude) from the University of Pisa and a PhD from the University of Southampton. He is advisory chair of the South African Communication Association (SACOMM), book and film reviews editor of Journal of African Cinemas, and a member of the International Advisory Board of Journal of African Media Studies. His recent and forthcoming publications include Borders, Media Crossings and the Politics of Translation: The Gaze from Southern Africa (Routledge, 2019) and Sovvertire i confini: traduzioni, media e lo sguardo dal sud (ombre corte, 2021). In 2020, he was a writing fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies and in 2021 he is a writing fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies. He is currently working on a book project on African cinemas.
Professor John Rapley
Professor John Rapley
John Rapley has made a vocation of working, and living, at the frontier where theory meets practice. After beginning his career at Oxford University’s International Development Centre, he left for the developing world, where he spent the next two decades working as an academic, journalist and ultimately the co-creator and director of a policy think tank. Along the way, he has done fellowships and visiting professorships at universities on three continents and, upon returning to the UK, lectured at the University of Cambridge’s Centre of Development Studies. He now makes his home at St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. The author of four books, dozens of scholarly articles, and over 1,000 newspaper and magazine features, he worked on two projects during his visiting fellowship at JIAS.
With Peter Heather, he is co-authoring The Lives of Empires (Penguin, 2020), which compares the history of the Roman Empire and the contemporary Western world to present a theory of imperial life-cycles. In tandem with this, he was writing a collection of short stories profiling the lives of ordinary people while they navigate this era of profound change, as the Western-dominated global order gives way to an emergent and as yet undefined one.
Meet the JIAS Team
The day to day running of JIAS is overseen by the staff led by the director, Dr Bongani Ngqulunga. The staff members are the following:
Dr Bongani Ngqulunga
Director of JIAS
Dr Bongani Ngqulunga
Director of JIAS
Dr Bongani Ngqulunga, who is the director of the institute is an academic, public sector administrator and author. Prior to joining JIAS, he worked in the South African Presidency for more than a decade. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Brown University in the United States and three degrees from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His appointment at JIAS became effective in June 2018. In the same month, Dr Ngqulunga won the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction for his book The Man Who Found the ANC: A Biography of Pixley ka Isaka Seme (Penguin, 2018).
Ms Emelia Kamena
Manager: Facilities and Operations
Ms Emelia Kamena
Manager: Facilities and Operations
Ms Emelia Kamena who manages all operational projects at JIAS, also oversees the running of facilities and general maintenance. Ms Kamena completed her Honours degree at the University of Johannesburg and she is studying towards her Master’s degree.
Ms Vanessa Kennedy
Manager: Marketing, Communications and Stakeholder Relations
Ms Vanessa Kennedy
Manager: Marketing, Communications and Stakeholder Relations
Ms Vanessa Kennedy, who is responsible for managing all marketing activities at JIAS holds a degree and B.com Honours in Marketing Management from the University of Johannesburg. Ms Kennedy also organises events and manages stakeholder relations.