Associate Professor Shamil Jeppie received his PhD from Princeton University. He has worked on aspects of the social history of Cape Town and Durban, South Africa, and 19th-century Sudan. Shamil founded The Tombouctou Manuscripts Project in which he explored the formation of a culture of collecting in Timbuktu. He also led a National Research Foundation study group on history and the humanities in South Africa today. He has been the chairperson of the South-South Exchange Programme in the History of Development (Sephis), and was the Director of HUMA, Institute for Humanities in Africa. Shamil serves on various platforms concerned with the development of the humanities, history and heritage in Africa and the global South.

Research Interests and Areas of Supervision:

• Vernacular
• Writing

Select publications:

• (co-edited with) Ebrahim Moosa and Richard Roberts, Muslim Family Law in Sub-Saharan Africa: Colonial Legacies and Post-Colonial Challenges (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010)
• (co-edited with Souleymane Bachir Diagne), The Meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008)
• Language, Identity, Modernity: The Arabic Study Circle of Durban (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007)
• (with Goolam Vahed), “Multiple Communities: Muslims in Post-Apartheid South Africa”, in State of the Nation: South Africa 2004-2005 By John Daniel, Roger Southall and Jessica Lutchman (Cape Town: HSRC Press and East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005) pp. 252-286.
• (ed.) Toward New Histories for South Africa: On the Place of the Past in Our Present (Lansdowne: Juta Gariep, 2004)
• “Leadership and Loyalties: The Imams of Nineteenth Century Colonial Cape Town, South Africa”, Journal of Religion in Africa, 26: 2 (1996), pp. 139-162
• (co-edited with Crain Soudien), The Struggle for District Six: Past and Present (Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990)