University of Johannesburg Department of History

27/10/2026

Yesterday, Mark Swilling launched his new book at Bridge Books in Marshalltown, 1985: The Langa Massacre and the Ending of White Rule in South Africa, published by University of Johannesburg Press. https://ujonlinepress.uj.ac.za/index.php/ujp/catalog/book/340 Here he is photographed in conversation with discussant, Mandla Nkomfe.

26/10/2026

5pm today!

21/10/2026

Yesterday, Prof Bongani Ngqulunga (Senior Executive Director: University Relations, Student Affairs, and Sport, UJ) and Dr Simphiwe Ngwane (Institutional Researcher, Gauteng Provincial Legislature) led a fascinating discussion in our Departmental seminar, on the history of Ilanga lase Natal. Prof Ngqulunga is the editor of a recently published volume on Ilanga and Dr Ngwane contributed a chapter: https://jacana.co.za/product/ulibambe-lingashoni-the-centenary-history-of-ilanga-lase-natal-newspaper-forthcoming-title-due-end-august/

15/10/2026

Our next seminar, coming up!

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