Overview
I work on the intellectual and social history of African decolonization, with a particular interest in women and gender politics. My main area of geographic focus has been South Africa, but my work to date has been quite focused on South Africans who found themselves outside of South Africa, and I continue to be drawn to ideas and people who circulate across borders.
Prior to coming to Cornell, I taught in the Department of History & Classical Studies and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University, and have been a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and a Fellow of the Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence (CEREV) at Concordia University. I am a current board member of the Workshop on Southern Africa, and my work has been published in edited volumes and journals including Signs, Safundi, the Journal of Women’s History, and the South African Historical Journal.
My first book, National Liberation and the Political Life of Exile (Ohio, New African Histories Series, 2025), looks at everyday life within the exiled African National Congress of South Africa (ANC), and examines the intersections of politics, familial intimacies, and nation-making that unfolded as the ANC tried to make its way home to South Africa. It also considers South African women’s intellectual and diplomatic engagements with networks of left internationalist supporters, including the Women’s International Democratic Federation.
My ongoing work focuses on the intellectual and social history of international development, and the intersections of national liberation movements with international development in theory and practice. I am also interested in biography as a mode of feminist history, and in theorizing the intersections between political and intimate violence in the context of revolutionary movements.
Research Focus
- Comparative and transnational
- Modern African history
- Gender and Sexuality
Publications
Book:
National Liberation and the Political Life of Exile: Sex, Gender, and Nation in the Struggle Against Apartheid. Ohio University Press, New African Histories Series, 2025 https://www.ohioswallow.com/9780821426661/national-liberation-and-the-political-life-of-exile/
Articles:
"The South African Communist Party's Revolutionary Horizons" (contribution to roundtable on Tom Lodge, Red Road to Freedom), Safundi 2024, (https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2024.2328901)
"Interrogating Black Marxism in Paul Landau's Spear" (contribution to roundtable on Paul Landau, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries), Safundi, 2024 (https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2024.2355764 )
“South African Women and the Politics of Peace in the 1950s,” South African Historical Journal, 2024 (https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2024.2308870). - Winner of the annual SAHJ Article Prize, for Volume 23 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02582473.2025.2473804
“Fantasy States: Nationalism, Intimacy, and Transgression in South African Women’s Political Memoirs", Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Vol 47, no 3, (Spring 2022): 765-787.(https://doi.org/10.1086/717734)
"The Travels of Florence Mophosho: The African National Congress and Left Internationalism,” Journal of Women’s History, vol 30, no 4 (2018): 84-108.
“If Not Feminism, Then What? Women’s Work in the African National Congress, 1980-1990,” in Women’s Activism and "Second Wave" Feminism: Transnational Histories, (eds) Jennifer Nelson and Barbara Molony. (London, Bloomsbury Press: 2017).
“Love I Cannot Begin to Explain: The politics of reproduction in the ANC in Exile, 1976-1990.” Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol 4, No 1 (2015): 63-81.