Adam Branch is Reader in International Politics and the Director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge. He received his PhD in political science from Columbia University and his BA from Harvard University. Prior to joining Cambridge, he was senior research fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala. Adam’s research concerns political violence, intervention, and global justice, with a regional focus on East Africa. He is author of two books, Displacing Human Rights and Africa Uprising, and is a member of the Vice Chancellor’s Advisory Group on the Legacies of Enslavement.

Thabo Msibi is Associate Professor in curriculum studies in the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he is also the Dean and Head of School. His research focus is on gender and sexuality issues in Education.  He is author of a book entitled Hidden sexualities of South African Teachers: Black male educators and same-sex desire.  Professor Msibi is recipient of multiple local and international awards, including: the Distinguished Alumni Early Careers Award by Teachers College, Columbia University; the Chen Yidan Visiting Global Fellowship at Harvard and the inaugural HSRC Young Scholars Medal in the Social Sciences and Humanities. 

Siyabonga Njica is a second-year PhD Gates Cambridge Scholar working on South African exiled artists’ engagements with print culture, drama, radio, and cinema during the anti-apartheid struggle and decolonisation movement. He read for a Bachelor of Social Science (Hons) degree as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow at the University of Cape Town before undertaking a Master of Philosophy in African Studies degree as a David and Elaine Potter Cambridge Scholar at Cambridge University. Siyabonga has recently been appointed as a Research Fellow by the Africa Open Institute for Music, Innovation and Research at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. 

Danelle van Zyl-Hermann is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in History at the University of Basel. She is a social historian with research interests in identity formation, knowledge production and the relations of power and agency between subaltern actors and states. Her work to date has focused on race and labour in South Africa in the context of the demise of the racial state and the ascent of neoliberal globalisation, and her book Privileged Precariat: White workers and South Africa’s long transition to majority rule is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Her latest research investigates competing epistemologies and practices shaping public health in post-war Kenya.