Emeritus Associate Professor 

David Cooper 

BSc(Eng) Cape Town MSocSc PhD Birmingham

Emeritus Professor 

Ari Sitas

PhD University of the Witwatersrand

I was a senior fellow and research associate in a number of institutions: the University of California, Berkeley, Ruskin College and Oxford University. I was a president of the South African Sociological Association, a Vice-President of the International Sociological Association and an Executive member of the African Sociological Association as well. I was also a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and, a Guest Professor at the Albert-Ludvigs University of Freiburg. I will be the incumbent to the Baghat Singh Chair of Historical Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University as from 2006.

I chair the Board of the National Institute for the Humanities and the Social Sciences and I direct the South African BRICS Think Tank which serves on the BRICS Think Tanks Council. I have also been appointed on the board of the National Research Foundation. I completed my PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand on the emergence of trade unions and social movements among black urban and migrant workers (1960s-1980s) under the supervision of Eddie and the late David Webster in 1984.I am also a writer, dramatist and poet and have been an activist in the Anti-Apartheid movement.

Associate Professor 

Kathy Luckett 

Director, Humanities Education Development Unit

Emeritus Professor

Owen Crankshaw 

BSc(Hons), BA(Hons), MA, PhD University of the Witwatersrand

Owen Crankshaw’s research addresses the urban studies debate on social polarization and professionalization in de-industrializing cities. Along with his postgraduate students, he has researched long-term trends in the patterns of employment and the changing geography of class and racial inequality in cities. This also entails studying the changing geography of housing inequality and its relationship to racial residential segregation.

He has just completed a book entitled Urban Inequality: Theory, evidence and method in Johannesburg, which is to be published by Bloomsbury Press (Zed imprint) in 2022.

Emeritus Professor

Johann Maree 

I am interested in the workplace restructuring and economic performance in South African industries in the light of South Africa's re-entry into the global economy. Job creation and skills development in South Africa. Employment relations and the labour market in Southern Africa. The role of trade unions in defending and advancing democracy in Southern Africa.

Professor

Lungisile Ntsebeza 

Director, Centre for African Studies (CAS)

Lungisile Ntsebeza is a Professor and the holder of the AC Jordan Chair in African Studies at the University of Cape Town. He is also the holder of the National Research Foundation (NRF) Research Chair in Land Reform and Democracy in South Africa.

He has conducted extensive published research on the land question in South African around themes such as land rights, democratisation, rural local government, traditional authorities and land, and agrarian movements. His book, Democracy Compromised: Chiefs and the Politics of Land in South Africa was published by Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden in 2005 and the HSRC Press in 2006. Prof. Ntsebeza has also co-edited two books: The Land Question in South Africa: the Challenge of Transformation and Redistribution, HSRC Press, 2007, with Ruth Hall; and Rural Resistance in South Africa: The Mpondo Revolts after fifty years, with Thembela Kepe, Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden, 2011 and UCT Press, 2012. His current research interests, apart from land and agrarians questions, include an investigation of African Studies at the University of Cape Town and a related project on the political and intellectual history of the late Archie Mafeje.

Professor 

Deborah Posel 

Institute of Humanities in Africa (HUMA)

Deborah Posel is a professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town, an appointment that coincided with her taking up the position as HUMA’s founding director in January 2010. Prior to that she spent many years at the University of Witwatersrand as a professor of sociology and director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), which she founded in 2000. She has been educated at the University of Witwatersrand and Nuffield College, Oxford, where she obtained her DPhil and was awarded the Gwilym Gibbon Prize Research Fellowship. She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, and a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) and a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS). She has written and published widely on aspects of South African politics and society during and beyond the apartheid years – including The Making of Apartheid (1991); Apartheid’s Genesis (1994) with Phil Bonner and Peter Delius; and Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2002) with Graeme Simpson.

Adjunct Associate Professor

Sharlene Swartz 

I am a research director in the Human and Social Development research programme of the Human Sciences Research Council in Cape Town, South Africa, and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Cape Town. My research interests include marginalised youth, social inequalities and participatory research methods. I am rated as an ‘Established Researcher’ by the National Research Foundation, and am the chair of the Restitution Foundation, a small NGO focussed on social transformation in South Africa.

I am the author of the following books: Teenage tata: Voices of young fathers in South Africa (with A. Bhana, 2009); Ikasi: The moral ecology of South African’s township youth (2009); Moral education in sub-Saharan Africa: Culture, economics, conflict and AIDS (ed. with M. Taylor, 2011); Old enough to know: Consulting children about sex education in Africa (with C. McLaughlin et al., 2012) and Youth citizenship and the politics of belonging (with M. Arnot, 2012).