Key Profile Area: Global South Studies
Prof. Ciraj Rassool, PhD
Member of the Global Faculty
Senior Professor of History, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town
Ciraj Rassool is Senior Professor of History at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), where he also directs the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies. Among his latest publications are Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts (Ann Arbor, 2017), written with Leslie Witz and Gary Minkley; and Missing and Missed: Subject, Politics, Memorialisation (published as Kronos: southern african histories, 44, 2018), co-edited with Nicky Rousseau and Riedwaan Moosage. At UWC, He directs the Remaking Societies, Remaking Persons Supranational Forum. He is one of the principal investigators of the international collaborative research projects, ‘Action for Restitution to Africa’, and ‘Re-connecting “Objects”: Epistemic Plurality and Transformative Practices in and beyond Museums.’
He is a member of the new South African National Advisory Board for Restitution and Repatriation. He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the study of the Von Luschan Collection at the State Museums of Berlin and of the Advisory Board of the Alexander Ecker Collection at Albert Ludwig University, Freiburg, Germany. He served on the boards of the District Six Museum, Iziko Museums of South Africa, the South African Heritage Resources Agency and the National Heritage Council. He also previously chaired the Scientific Committee of the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM) and was a member of the High Level Advisory Committee on Museums for UNESCO.
Representative publications:
'Re-storing the Skeletons of Empire: Return, Reburial and Rehumanisation in Southern Africa', Journal of Southern African Studies, 41, 3, June 2015, 653-670.
Derek Peterson, Kodzo Gavua and Ciraj Rassool (eds), The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015, The International African Library Series.
Leslie Witz, Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool, Unsettled History: Making South African Pasts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017).
‘The Politics of Nonracialism in South Africa’, Public Culture, 31, 2, May 2019, 343-371.
‘Remaking Cape Town: Memory Politics, Land Restitution and Social Cohesion in District Six’, in Hiroyuki Hino, Arnim Langer, John Lonsdale and Frances Stewart (eds), From Divided Pasts to Cohesive Futures: Reflections on Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 346-374.