Advisory Board

Uhuru Phalafala

Chairperson

Uhuru Portia Phalafala (PhD, UCT) is a lecturer in the English department at Stellenbosch University. She is an archivist of black cultural production and a jazz records collector. Her research interests are material cultures, black archives, anti-apartheid and anti-colonial movements, Cold War-era cultural circuitries, and black internationalism. She is currently completing her book project on black radical traditions from the south.

Vonani Bila

Secretary

Vonani Bila was born in Shirley village, Limpopo, South Africa, where he still lives. He is the author of five books of poems in English and eight story-books for newly literate adult readers in Xitsonga, Sepedi and English. He is a poet, musician, creative writing coach and editor. He holds an MA in Creative Writing (cum laude) from Rhodes University, South Africa. Currently he is a PhD candidate at Wits University.

Barbara Boswell

Member

Barbara Boswell is the author of Grace: A Novel and And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women's Novels as Feminism. She is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. Barbara holds a PhD from the University of Maryland.

Busani Ngcaweni

Member

Busani Ngcaweni is the Principal of the School of Government. He previously worked as the Deputy Director-General in The Presidency of South Africa. His edited books include: "Nelson R. Mandela: Decolonial Ethics of Liberation and Servant Leadership" (Africa World Press, in press, 2016) and "Sizonqoba: Outliving AIDS in Southern Africa".

Danai Mupotsa

Member

Danai S. Mupotsa is a Senior Lecturer in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She specialises in gender and sexualities, black intellectual traditions and histories, intimacy and affect and feminist pedagogies. She is a member of the editorial collective of Agenda, sits on the editorial board of the Brill series in youth cultures and serves on the executive board of the International Girlhood Studies Association. In 2018, she published her first collection of poetry entitled feeling and ugly. Danai is a 2020 Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equality

Shubnum Khan

Member

Shubnum Khan is a South African writer and artist. She has an MA in English from UKZN (cum laude) and has published a novel (Onion Tears, 2011) and a travel memoir (How I accidentally became a global stock photo and other strange and wonderful stories, 2021). She has been published in The New York Times, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, New Contrast, The Sunday Times, Huffpost and Saraba Magazine and a number of local anthologies. In 2019 she was selected as a Mellon Fellow at Stellenbosch University. She lives in Durban where she is currently working on her second novel and takes private art commissions.

Lidudumalingani

Member

Lidudumalingani is a writer, filmmaker and photographer. In 2016, he won the Caine Prize, and was awarded the Miles Morland Scholarship the same year, to write his debut novel. He has contributed essays to book collections and has written a foreword to a poetry collection.

Tshepo Madlingozi

Member

Tshepo Madlingozi is the Director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at WITS University. He has master’s degrees in both law and sociology and he received his PhD degree from Birkbeck, University of London. He is a Research Associate at the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education at Nelson Mandela University. He is the co-editor of South African Journal on Human Rights and part of the management team of Pretoria University Law Press.

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