Writing Fellows 2022
Semester 1
Professor Arkebe Oqubay
Senior Minister, Professor of Practice
Professor Arkebe Oqubay
Senior Minister, Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg
ARKEBE Oqubay is an Ethiopian Senior Minister, Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg and SOAS University of London. He has been at the centre of policymaking and government leadership for over 30 years. He is the former mayor of Addis Ababa, winner of the Best African Mayor of 2006 Award, and finalist in the World Mayor Award 2006 for transforming the city. He has served as board chair and vice-chair of several leading public organisations and international advisory boards. He is a recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star presented by the Emperor of Japan. He has been recognised for his innovative and strategic leadership role in the economic transformation of Ethiopia and championing Africa’s industrialisation. His ability to combine the theoretical understanding of the industrialisation process with the practice of policy implementation has earned him recognition by the NewAfrican as one of the 100 Most Influential Africans of 2016 and a “leading thinker on Africa’s strategic development”.
His scholarly work and recent publications with the Oxford University Press include: Made in Africa: Industrial Policy in Ethiopia (2015); African Economic Development: Evidence, Theory, Policy (2020, with Christopher Cramer and John Sender); The Oxford Handbook of the South African Economy (2021, with Fiona Tregenna and Imraan Valodia); How Nations Learn: Technological Learning, Industrial Policy, and Catch-Up (2019, with Ohno Kenichi); China-Africa and an Economic Transformation (2019, with Justin Yifu Lin); The Oxford Handbook of the Ethiopian Economy (2019, with Fantu Cheru and Christopher Cramer); The Oxford Handbook of Industrial Hubs and Economic Development (2020, with Justin Yifu Lin); and The Oxford Handbook of Industrial Policy (2020, with Christopher Cramer, Ha-Joon Chang, and Richard Kozul-Wright).
He is Visiting Professor at Sciences Po (Paris) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Fudan (Shanghai), and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Malaya. He is a UNU-WIDER Honorary Research Fellow, a Distinguished Fellow at the London-based think-tank, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), and Senior Research Associate at the Vienna Institute of International Economic Studies.
He holds a PhD in development studies from SOAS, University of London and was the African candidate for Director General of UNIDO.
Dr Nafisa Essop Sheik
Historian
Dr Nafisa Essop Sheik
Historian and lecturer, University of Johannesburg.
Nafisa Essop Sheik received her Doctorate from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and teaches in the Department of History at the University of Johannesburg. She is an Historian of Gender, Law and late Colonial State-Making in Southern Africa, and includes amongst numerous broader research interests intellectual history, historiography and theory.
She has most recently been part of the transnational Mellon-funded Governing Intimacies Research Project, based at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is a contributor to Reading for Water ,the first workshop on Hydrocolonialism, part of a project in the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and based at WiSER. She was the first South African to complete a term as Julien and Virginia Cornell Visiting Professor in History at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in the US since the appointment of Professor Fatima Meer in 1984. While at JIAS, Nafisa will be using the opportunity to complete her current writing project: a book manuscript to be submitted to Manchester University Press’s Series Governing Intimacies in the Global South, provisionally titled Colonial Rites: Sex, Law and States of Difference in a Nineteenth Century British South African Colony.
Dr Yolande Bouka
Political Scientist
Dr Yolande Bouka
Political Scientist and Assistant Professor of gender, politics and international relations at Queen’s University in Canada.
Yolande Bouka is a political scientist and Assistant Professor of gender and politics and international relations at Queen’s University in Canada. Prior to her academic appointment, she worked as a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in the Conflict Prevention and Risk Analysis Division, focusing on Africa’s Great Lakes Region. Her research focuses on gender, political violence, and race and international relations. Two of the key questions driving her multidisciplinary research agenda are how vulnerable groups and individuals understand and navigate structural and political violence and how these experiences influence the social and political landscapes of conflict-affected societies. Bouka will use the JIAS fellowship to complete a full draft of her scholarly book manuscript provisionally titled In the Shadow of Prison: Transitional Justice and Carceral Politics in Rwanda, which, based on years of interview and archival research, explores the expanding role of prisons and incarceration in transitional African societies, looking at Rwanda as a case study.
Siya Khumalo
Writer
Siya Khumalo
Writer
Siya Khumalo was reprimanded at a dinner party for “talking about religion, politics and sex in polite company”. This prompted him to write a number of analyses that culminated in the book titled You Have To Be Gay To Know God (Kwela Books, April 2018), which, in 2019, made the long-list for the Sunday Times’ Alan Paton Literary Award and the shortlist for the UJ Debut Prize. It won the Desmond Tutu-Gerrit Brand Literary Prize. Khumalo has since contributed to a number of anthologies. He is a News24 columnist, ex-military, a Mr. Gay South Africa runner-up and Mr. Gay World Top 10 finalist.
Professor Srila Roy
Associate Professor of Sociology
Professor Srila Roy
Associate Professor of Sociology and heads development studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
Srila Roy is associate professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She is the author of Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement (Oxford, 2012), editor of New South Asian Feminisms (Zed, 2012), and co-editor of New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualising Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford, 2015). Her book on feminist and queer politics in neoliberal India is forthcoming with Duke University Press. At Wits, she leads the Governing Intimacies project, which promotes new scholarship on gender and sexuality in Southern Africa and India, and is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.
Sukoluhle Nyathi
Writer
Sukoluhle Nyathi
Writer
Sukoluhle Nyathi was born, bred and educated in Bulawayo, and now resides in South Africa. She describes herself as an investment analyst by profession and a writer by passion. She has a career spanning over 20 years in the financial services sector. Fate retired her from this profession in 2020 so she could pursue writing full time. Sue is the author of three published fiction novels: The Polygamist (2012) The Gold Diggers (2018) and A Family Affair (2020) She recently edited a nonfiction anthology titled: When Secrets Become Stories, Women Speak Out (2021) which is a compilation of nonfiction essays with a gender based violence theme.
Professor Premilla Nadasen
Professor of History
Professor Premilla Nadasen
Professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Premilla Nadasen is a professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing. She is the author of two award-winning books, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women who Built a Movement and Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States. She is currently writing a biography of South African performer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba, tentatively titled: Mama Africa: Miriam Makeba, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and Transnational Black Solidarity.
Dr Maria Suriano
Historian
Dr Maria Suriano
Cultural historian of East Africa.
Maria Suriano is a cultural historian of East Africa. She teaches various courses in African and Indian Ocean history at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her research interests include past and present African popular culture, African print cultures and circular discourses, life history writing, Tanzanian/Swahili studies, and everyday transnational anti-apartheid solidarities. She has published in the Journal of African Cultural Studies, Africa Today, the Journal of Southern African Studies, African Studies and Africa: Journal of the International African Institute.
Professor Tendayi Sithole
Professor in Political Sciences
Professor Tendayi Sithole
Professor in the Department of Political Sciences, University of South Africa.
Tendayi Sithole is Professor in the Department of Political Sciences, University of South Africa. He is a founding member of Africa Decolonial Research Network. Sithole is the author of The Black Register (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020) and Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2016). His research interests are Azanian thought, Africana existentialist phenomenology, black poetics, critical theory, decoloniality, and jazz studies. With his wide-ranging research interests, Sithole is committed to investigate the critical intelligence and insurgence of blackness in the long-arc of coloniality. His projects are liberatory in nature and they wage a radical critique against the enclosure of the liberal consensus and antiblackness. With the analytic engine of understanding the lived experience of being-black-in-an-antiblack-world, Sithole’s quest is radically insisted in two forthcoming books, namely Discourse on Decolonial Prayer by Iwalewa Books and Mabogo P. More: Philosophical Anthropology in Azania by Rowman and Littlefields International. Sithole has just completed a book length manuscript entitled “Hortense J. Spillers: Subject, Abject, and Insurgent” and is currently at work with another one entitled “The Conjunctions of Black Consciousness in Azania.”
Writing Fellows 2022
Semester 2
Professor Molly Andrews
Honorary Professor of Political Psychology
Professor Molly Andrews
Honorary Professor of Political Psychology at the Social Research Institute, University College London
Molly Andrews is Honorary Professor of Political Psychology at the Social Research Institute, University College London, and the co-director of the Association of Narrative Research and Practice. In 2019-2020, she was the Jane and Aatos Professor in Studies on Contemporary Society at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her research interests include political narratives, the psychological basis of political commitment, political identity, patriotism, and aging. Her books include Lifetimes of Commitment: Aging, Politics, Psychology and Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change (both Cambridge University Press), and Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life (Oxford University Press). She serves on the Editorial Board of five journals which are published in four countries, and her publications have appeared in Chinese, German, Swedish, Spanish, French, Czech, German and Finnish. For more information, see https://www.mollyandrews.co.uk/
Dr Tinashe Mushakavanhu
Writer and scholar
Dr Tinashe Mushakavanhu
Zimbabwe born writer and scholar
Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a Zimbabwe born writer and scholar who is interested in the literary histories and archives of Southern Africa. For many years he was a literary columnist in his home country writing for local magazines and newspapers. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Kent, and has held prestigious fellowships in Edinburgh, Johannesburg and New York. His recent book project is called A Brief History of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair (forthcoming Cambridge University Press, 2022). He continues to build critical and creative scholarship that explores the life and writings of the enfant terrible of African Literature, Dambudzo Marechera.
Dr Stefanie Bognitz
Social anthropologist
Dr Stefanie Bognitz
Social anthropologist
Stefanie Bognitz is a social anthropologist with strong interest in epistemologies embracing the political, legal, ethical and everyday resonances and remakings after genocide. As a PhD candidate she was a member of the International Max Planck Research School on Retaliation, Mediation and Punishment at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, the Graduate School Society and Culture in Motion at the University of Halle and the Law, Organization, Science and Technology Research Network. She held assistant professor positions at the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Halle. She has conducted ethnographic inquiries with people who share into the experience and memory of ethnic and political violence while engaging in the everyday of being together again as neighbours. With a regional focus on the Great Lakes Region of the African continent, Stefanie’s anthropological work in Rwanda also took her to Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda. Stefanie’s scholarly engagement seeks out the possibilities and threats of people agreeing to the making of promises that are nestled between unspeakable pasts of violence and the hopes and actions they invest in the achievement of more livable futures.
At JIAS she completes her first single authored monograph “A Measure of Promise: The Everyday of Access to Justice in Rwanda”.
Professor Liz Gunner
Visiting Professor
Professor Liz Gunner
Visiting Professor 4.0 in the Department of LanCSAL, University of Johannesburg.
Liz Gunner is Visiting Professor 4.0 in the Department of LanCSAL, University of Johannesburg. Her research is on performance, orality and social meaning in Africa, and on African media, especially radio. Her recent books are, Radio Soundings: South Africa and the Black Modern (2019) and Radio in Africa: Publics, Cultures, Communities, eds. Liz Gunner, Dina Ligaga and Dumisani Moyo (2012), and earlier, Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature, eds Graham Furniss and Liz Gunner (2008). She is presently working on gender, voice and histories of exclusion in South Africa, on music and migration, and on praise poetry in the context of world literature. She is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Southern African Studies, African Studies and Muziki.
Dr Amos Darkwa Asare
Lecturer in the Department of Music and Dance
Dr Amos Darkwe Asare
Lecturer in the Department of Music and Dance at the University of Cape Coast (UCC).
Amos Darkwe Asare is a lecturer in the Department of Music and Dance at the University of Cape Coast (UCC). He obtained his Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology and Cultural Policy from the University of Cape Coast and the University of Hildesheim respectively. In Amos’ Ph.D. thesis he analyzed cultural policy support for the performing arts sector in Ghana. Amos had his Bachelor’s degree in Music (Honours) at the University of Cape Coast and proceeded to the University of the Arts, Helsinki, Sibelius Academy, in Finland to pursue a Master’s degree in Global Music.
Amos is a researcher, a pedagogue, and a performer. He teaches in Music Business in the Department of Music, UCC, the first of its kind in any public university in Ghana. He is highly knowledgeable in both Ghanaian traditional and contemporary musical styles. He is a traditional drummer and handles numerous Ghanaian choral groups. He has one choral album to his credit. Currently, Amos’ research interest is on the musical healing rituals of the Twelve Apostles Church in Ghana. He is particularly interested in how policy addresses such indigenous musical healing rituals in contemporary Ghana where modern medicine is predominantly practiced.
Ms Stephanie Jenkins
Actor, writer, director and academic
Ms Stephanie Jenkins
Actor, writer, director and academic
Stephanie Jenkins is an actor, writer, director and academic who has worked in a number of capacities in the world of theatre and academia. She has been busy in 2021 completing her PhD in Museum Theatre as well as receiving mentorship in the writing of a new full length play through the University of Johannesburg’s Playwriting Laboratory. She has recently written and directed Beer Halls, Pass Laws and Just Cause staged at the KwaMuhle Museum in Durban in 2020. Through the Fellowship, she will be continuing her research and writing of museum theatre by creating a new play which will be based in a Johannesberg Museum.
Sihle Khumalo
Writer
Sihle Khumalo
South Africa’s award winning and bestselling author.
Sihle Khumalo is South Africa’s award winning and bestselling author. He has written four books and contributed to two. His first book, Dark Continent My Black Arse, became a bestseller within weeks of being published. His third book, Almost Sleeping my way to Timbuktu, won the 2014 SA Literary Award (creative non-fiction category). His fourth book, Rainbow Nation My Zulu Arse, was longlisted for the Alan Paton Award. He has qualifications from the Durban University of Technology (DUT) as well as Wits and Stellenbosch Business Schools. His next book will be published next year (2023).
Dr Janet Remmington
Researcher, writer, and publisher.
Dr Janet Remmington
Researcher, writer, and publisher.
Janet Remmington- Johannesburg-born and currently Oxford-based, Janet Remmington is a researcher, writer, and publisher. She combines a professional life in global academic publishing with research affiliations in African Studies at the University of York and University of the Witwatersrand. She has published widely in academic outlets, including co-editing the NIHSS-award-winning volume Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Past and Present (Wits Press, 2016), while contributing to literary magazines and newspapers. Her monograph in preparation explores the rich textual cultures, historical contours, and politics of black South African travel, 1850-2020.
Dr Jill Kelly
Historian
Dr Jill Kelly
Historian of South Africa, associate professor at Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX, USA), and honorary research associate at the University of Cape Town.
Jill Kelly is an historian of South Africa, associate professor at Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX, USA), and honorary research associate at the University of Cape Town. She is the author of To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Authority, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800-1996 (Michigan State University Press, 2018; University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2019) and articles in journals such as the South African Historical Journal, History in Africa, and the African Studies Review. Her research interests include gender, traditional authority, land, and violence in KwaZulu-Natal. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and Fulbright fellowships. She intends to use the JIAS Writing Fellowship to finish a draft of her new book on rural women in anti-apartheid protests in the 1950s.