Jocelyn Alexander
Jocelyn Alexander is Professor of Commonwealth Studies at the University of Oxford. She has written widely on the social and political history of southern Africa. Her books include Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘dark forests’ of Matabeleland, co-authored with JoAnn McGregor and Terence Ranger, and The Unsettled Land: State-making and the politics of land in Zimbabwe. She is currently engaged in a collaborative research project on the transnational lives of southern African liberation armies.
Elleke Boehmer
Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English in the English Faculty, University of Oxford, and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College. She is a founding figure in the field of postcolonial and world literature studies in English. Her critical work includes Postcolonial Poetics (2018) and Indian Arrivals (2015) which won the 2015–16 ESSE prize. Her 2008 biography of Nelson Mandela has been widely translated, as has her bestseller Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005). Boehmer’s fiction includes To the Volcano (2019) and The Shouting in the Dark, winner of the 2018 EASA Olive Schreiner Prize for Prose. To the Volcano was commended for the 2019 Australian Review of Books Elizabeth Jolley Prize. In 2019–21 Boehmer held a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship for ‘Southern Imagining: a literary history of the far southern hemisphere’. The project monograph will appear in 2025. Elleke also works on the UKRI funded ‘Accelerate Hub’ in which she researches how storytelling practices underpin and impact African identities.
Shadreck Chirikure
Shadreck Chirikure is Edward Hall Professor of Archaeological Science, Director Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art and British Academy Global Professor in the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford. In his research, Chirikure applies techniques from the natural and social sciences to study ancient materials and technologies to derive innovations with potential use in the present. Chirikure uses the results of discoveries in the field and the laboratory to develop new understanding, conserve heritage and tackle global challenges in STEM-related fields. He is a recipient of several prestigious awards, a Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Fellow of the Academy of Science of
Simbarashe Shadreck Chitima
Dr Simbarashe Shadreck Chitima is a Senior Lecturer and Chairperson of the Department of Archaeology, Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, Midlands State University. He is the Midlands State University Research Board Chairperson. He has extensively published in the field of museum studies, cultural heritage, visual arts, and records and archives management. His research interests include Museum Collections Management, Heritage Management, Heritage, Education, Museum Communication, Museum Exhibition Design and Interpretation, Visual Arts, Art Aesthetics, Museum Management, and Museums and Global Issues.
Lena Englund
Lena Englund currently works as Senior Researcher at the University of Eastern Finland, focusing particularly on topics relating to autobiographical writing and nonfiction. She has published extensively on southern African writing and various topics relating to personal histories, autobiographical memory, and the past. To date, Englund is the author of three monographs: South African Autobiography as Subjective History: Making Concessions to the Past (2021), Home and Nation in Anglophone Autobiographies of Africa (2023), and Storying Contemporary Migration: Representation, Aspirations, Advocacy (2024).
Shari Eppel
Dr Shari Eppel is a Zimbabwean who lives and works in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. A forensic anthropologist and a psychologist, she has been involved for 25 years with exhumation and reburial of those murdered in the 1980s in her region, by the post independent state. Shari has trained colleagues in forensic anthropology and has tracked the socio-cultural impact of exhumations and reburials on families and communities over more than two decades. In recent years, this has increasingly become work with the next generation of survivors, as transgenerational memory and trauma is now a reality. Shari heads the only non-governmental professional exhumation team in sub-Saharan Africa.
Petina Gappah
Dr Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean national who was born in Zambia, and has law degrees from the Universities of Cambridge, Graz and Zimbabwe. She is currently the Principal Legal Advisor in the Office of the Secretary-General of the African Continental Free Trade Area based in Accra, Ghana. One of the pioneer lawyers at the Advisory Centre on WTO Law in Geneva for more than a decade, she was the advisor to more than 70 African, Asian, Caribbean, and
Amanda Hammar
Amanda Hammar, a Scandinavian-based Zimbabwean, is Professor of African Studies at the Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen and has been president of the European African Studies Association from 2019 to 2025. Her individual research and publications include works on land and agrarian change, displacement economies, resettlement, urban politics, national ID systems, state making, citizenship, and critical African Studies. While focusing empirically mainly on Zimbabwe and southern Africa, she also has a broader Africa-centric orientation and commitment. Among her other edited/co-edited collections are Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis (Weaver Press, 2003), a Journal of Southern African Studies special issue on ‘The Zimbabwe Crisis through the Lens of Displacement’ (2010), and the edited volume Displacement Economies: Paradoxes of Crisis and Creativity in Africa (Zed Press, 2014).
Pedzisai Maedza
Pedzisai Maedza is an Assistant Professor in Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland and a Research Associate at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Prior to this he held a British Academy Newton International Fellowship at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. His work interrogates the formative function of violence and how its cultural representation shapes memory and commemoration. He is the author of Performing Asylum: Theatre of Testimony in South Africa and has published several book chapters and peer-reviewed articles in internationally recognised journals on Performance, Genocide, and Cultural Memory.
Owen Maseko
Owen Maseko is one of Zimbabwe’s most prominent, multi-talented visual artists. Bulawayo-based, he works in a range of artistic media, including painting, installations, sculpture and ceramics, as well as music. He both organizes and participates in local exhibitions (which the state occasionally disrupts), and is also a cultural activist and community arts educator, having founded
Minna Johanna Niemi
Minna Johanna Niemi is associate professor in the English literature section at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway. She received her PhD in English from the University at Buffalo in 2011. Her research interests include questions of responsibility and complicity, as well as ecocriticism. Her book Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited was published by Routledge, 2021. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies, as well as in Callaloo, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the South African Journal of Philosophy, Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Southern African Studies, and ARIEL. Her current project examines African writers’ representations of the contemporary refugee crisis in Europe.
Mphathisi Ndlovu
Mphathisi Ndlovu is a research associate at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). He is also a Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the National University of Science and Technology (Zimbabwe). His research interests are in collective memory, identity politics, and digital cultures. Mphathisi’s works have been published as book chapters, and peer reviewed articles in journals such as Digital Journalism, Journal of Genocide Research, and Nations and Nationalism. He co-edited books titled The Idea of Matabeleland in Digital Spaces: Genealogies, Discourses and Epistemic Struggles (2022), and Remembering Mass Atrocities: Perspectives on Memory Struggles and Cultural Representations in Africa (2024).
Astrid Rasch
Astrid Rasch is Associate Professor of English at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research examines memory culture at the end of the British Empire with a particular focus on Zimbabwe, Australia, the Caribbean, and Britain. She is editor of the anthologies Life Writing After Empire (Routledge, 2017), Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain (with Stuart Ward, Bloomsbury, 2019), and a special issue of Journal of Southern African Studies entitled ‘Writing Repression’ (with Minna Johanna Niemi and Jocelyn Alexander, 2021, 47.5). Her recent publications appear in History & Memory, Journal of Postcolonial and Commonwealth Studies, Journal of Southern African Studies,
Timothy Scarnecchia
Timothy Scarnecchia is Professor of African History, Kent State University. He is the author of Race and Diplomacy in Zimbabwe: The Cold War and Decolonization, 1960–1984 (Cambridge University Press, 2021, Open Access title 2023) and The Urban Roots of Democracy and Political Violence in Zimbabwe: Harare and Highfield, 1940–1964 (Rochester University Press, 2008). Scarnecchia has written many articles and chapters investigating the political history of Zimbabwean and Southern African decolonization and the Cold War, including, ‘Post-1989 Cold War Diplomatic Shifts in Southern Africa’ Comparativ (Leipzig) 29: 5 2019 74–89; and ‘Renegotiating Frontline State Relations after Zimbabwe’s Independence. Cold War Influences on the Politics of Zimbabwe’s Role in Frontline State Solidarity, 1980–1986,’ Rivista italiana di storia internazionale 1/2023, pp. 41–72.
Thomas Panganayi Thondhlana
Thomas Panganayi Thondhlana is the current holder of the UNESCO Chair on African Heritage at the Great Zimbabwe University. He holds an MS c and PhD in Archaeology from the University College London. His research interests cut across several areas, which include national and ethnic identities, archaeological science, liberation heritage, and World Heritage management. He has co-edited several books including African Museums in the Making: Reflections on the Politics of Material and Public Culture in Zimbabwe (Langaa RPCIG, 2015) and Independent Museums and Culture Centres in Colonial and Post-Colonial Zimbabwe: Non-State Players, Local Communities and Self-Representation (Routledge, 2022).
Katja Uusihakala
Katja Uusihakala is a researcher in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki. She is interested in politics and practices of memory in (post) colonial migrant or displaced communities. In her recent projects she has focused on the politics and temporalities of reconciliation, examining the partial scopes and silences of postcolonial apology, with a specific focus on child migration to colonial Southern Rhodesia. The results of her long-term ethnographic research will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in the monograph Imperial Investments: Legacies of displacement in British child migration to Southern Rhodesia, in 2025.