University of Johannesburg Department of History

12/09/2026

Our next seminar, on Tuesday!

02/09/2026

Prof Catherine Burns launches her co-authored book at Love Books, Melville on Thurs, 10 Sept @ 18.30 (Durban and Cape Town launches to follow) https://jacana.co.za/product/sinikithemba-the-labour-of-hope-and-science-at-mccord-hospital-in-the-era-of-hiv/

01/09/2026

Some photographs from last week's Doctoral workshop, generously hosted by Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, part of our Department's ongoing collaboration with the Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Makerere University, and Professor Shireen Hassim, of Carleton University. Special highlights included, among others, a visit to the Wondercave and Driemolen Paleo-environmental site, guided by Dr Stephanie Caruana, from the UJ Palaeo Research Institute and a tour of Wits Historical Papers by Gabriele Mohale.

27/08/2026

21/08/2026

Please email Stephen Sparks for the Zoom link.

21/08/2026

UJ’s Department of History and the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) invites you to a public lecture:

Crafting Race, Crafting Identity: Fatima Meer and the Making of Blackness in the Twentieth Century
Shireen Hassim (Department of History, Carleton University)

The idea of race continues to be reproduced as if it has stable referents in theory and in politics. In the ongoing process of boundary-making in South African debates, the longer history of crafting identities has either receded from consideration or been treated as irrelevant, a matter of settled history from which we can proceed as if racial groups (and their interests) are self-evident. My work on the life and writings of Fatima Meer suggests an avenue for thinking afresh about the relationship between individual biography and larger social and political processes of racialisation. Meer is both a figure of racial complexity in the South African sense of racial categorisation, as well as a scholar-activist who destabilised conventional understandings of identity in her work on race and resistance. She lived through and was active in some of the most consequential events in South Africa’s twentieth century. This, together with her unusual positioning in the black consciousness movement and her centrality in the process of making Indians into insider-subjects of black political identities offers a unique opportunity to use biography to explore how race and racialization are discursively and institutionally defined and politically mapped.

Date: August 25, 2026 @ 4PM
Venue: Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, 1 Tolip St, Westdene or via Zoom

31/07/2026

Warm congratulations to Perside Ndandu awarded her PhD for her dissertation 'Anaemia Research in the Twentieth Century Afro-Indian Ocean Laboratory: Tropical Medicine, Race and Wellcome’s Henry Foy and Athena Kondi' (Supervisor: Prof Thembisa Waetjen) and Lepang Victor Molokwe awarded his MA for his dissertation 'The History of Health and Healing in Vryburg, 1936–1970s' (Supervisor: Prof Catherine Burns)

31/07/2026

UJ History postgraduate students (Lebohang Seganoe, Jiyoung Lee, Nonkoliso Tshiki) and staff (Thembisa Waetjen and Natasha Erlank - SAHS Treasurer) recently attended and presented work at the Southern African Historical Society conference in Harare, Zimbabwe. A great time was had by all!

12/07/2026

Update: today in Longueval, France, South Africa's President Cyril Rampahosa led the solemn commemoration of the 110th anniversary of the Battle of Deville Wood. UJ History students Refilwe Raphadu, Tebatso Pooe, Precious Mashaba and Nyeleti Chabalala accompanied President Ramaphosa during his tour of the cemetery, and also met with the Minister of Higher Education and Training, Buti Manamela.
https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/1143755-2/

10/07/2026

This Sunday, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will be in France, presiding over the 110th Anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Delville Wood, in which hundreds of South African soldiers, of all backgrounds, perished, during World War I.

As part of this year's commemoration events, four of our UJ History postgraduates are serving as tour guides and representatives of South Africa at the memorial site in Arras, France. Refilwe Raphadu and Tebatso Pooe have been hard at work for the past six weeks in France, and will soon be joined by Precious Mashaba and Nyeleti Chabalala who headed off to France today. All of our student guides will be part of the commemoration events which will be led by our President.

Mashaba and Chabalala are pictured below as they were sent off by their families and UJ History faculty. Professor Nafisa Essop Sheik has been working closely with the sponsors, The Delville Wood Trust and the Commonwealth Graves Foundation for the past year to recruit, train, prepare and supervise the UJ students who are representing us. Also pictured is History HoD Dr. Tshepo Moloi.

tps://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/south-africa-honour-delville-wood-heroes