Beinart William

Prof William Beinart

Email:: william.beinart@sant.ox.ac.uk
Telephone:: +44 (0)1865 613911

Position:

Rhodes Professor of Race Relations and Director of Graduate Studies at the African Studies Centre

Title:

Professor

College:

St Antony's College

Office Details:

92 Woodstock Road

Introduction:

William Beinart has been Rhodes Professor of Race Relations since 1997. The position was established in 1953 to research and teach on relations between white and black in Southern and Central Africa as well as ‘race relations’ more generally. It has become an African Studies post and the three incumbents thus far have all been specialists on southern Africa. Prior to this he worked in Historical Studies at the University of Bristol and was co-editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies and chair of its editorial board. He was the founding Director of the African Studies Centre at Oxford (2002-6), and chair of the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS) with Roger Goodman (2006-8). SIAS, one of the fastest-growing departments in the university, has provided a framework for the Area Studies centres, and also for the launch of new centres and degrees. He is currently President of the African Studies Association of the UK (2008-10) and is Director of Graduate Studies at the African Studies Centre from 2009-10.

Research Activities and Interests:

His major research and teaching interests are in South African history and politics and in environmental history. Much of his earlier research focussed on rural African communities in the Eastern Cape and he has retained this interest. In 2009 he interviewed at Mbotyi, in Mpondoland, on local veterinary knowledge and practices as part of a broader project on the history of livestock management and veterinary ideas. He has published an overview history, Twentieth-Century South Africa (2001) and recently edited, with Marcelle Dawson, a collection of essays by former and current doctoral students at Oxford on Popular Pollitics and Resistance Movements in South Africa. A number of his doctoral students, past and present, have researched in this field, including: resistance movements and violence from the 1950s to 1970s; the relationship between strikes and boycotts (1978-82); HIV/AIDs activism; ZANU PF's use of history and propaganda; new social movements; political elites and popular politics in Transkei (1960-1994); grass roots nationalism in the Eastern Cape; the insurrection in the Vaal triangle. He is mentoring a research project by Hugh Macmillan on the ANC in Zambia, 1965-1990. In recent years he has focussed on environmental history, published the Rise of Conservation in South Africa (2003) and, with Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (2007). He has completed with Luvuyo Wotshela, Prickly Pear: the History of a Plant in South Africa (forthcoming University of Witwatersrand Press) and is currently involved in projects on livestock management and disease, as well as the history of wildlife film.

He has supervised a number of doctoral students in this field, including histories of: Moremi National Park in Botswana: veterinary services and livestock diseases in South Africa; epizootics in the nineteenth century Cape; colonial environmental sciences in Africa; wildlife farming; fire science and ecology in South Africa.

Teaching Responsibilities:

In the African Studies masters, he makes some contribution to the core courses and teaches options on Apartheid and the Transition in South Africa, and on the environmental history of southern and central Africa. He is launching, with colleagues, an option on Film in Africa in 2009-10.

Publications:

He has recently completed, with Lotte Hughes, an overview entitled Environment and Empire, as well as a much more focused project on the social history of an exotic plant, prickly pear, in South Africa.

Full Publications Listing