Biography
Professor Saul Dubow was educated at the Universities of Cape Town and Oxford. His teaching and research concentrates on the history of modern South Africa from the early-nineteenth century to the present. He has published widely on the development of racial segregation and apartheid in all its aspects: political, ideological and intellectual. He has special interests in the history of race, ethnicity and national identity, as well as imperialism, colonial science, knowledge, and global history.
Professor Dubow is an AHRC Fellow for 2012 and will spend the year on research leave completing a book on the history of apartheid.
Professor Dubow's principal publications include:
- A Commonwealth of Knowledge. Science, Sensibility and White South Africa , 1820-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2006)
- Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
- Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa, 1919-36 (Macmillan, 1989
- The African National Congress (2000).
In addition, Saul Dubow has edited Science and Society in Southern Africa (Manchester, 2000); South Africa's 1940s: Worlds of Possibilities (Double Storey, 2005); a new edition of W.Sachs' Black Hamlet, with Jacqueline Rose (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa, with William Beinart (Routledge,1995); and Charles Bloomberg's Christian-Nationalism and the Development of the Afrikaner Broederbond, 1918-48 Macmillan, 1990).
Recent journal publications include:
2007: `How British was the British World? The Case of South Africa`, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37, (2009), 1–27
2008: `Smuts, the United Nations and the Rhetoric of Race and Rights’,Journal of Contemporary History 43, 1 (2008), 43-72.
2008: `The New Age of Imperialism: British and South African perspectives’, in Mary N. Harris and Csaba Lévai (eds) Europe and its Empires (Pisa, 2008), 1-16; http://ehlee.humnet.unipi.it/books3/6/1.pdf
2009 `Keith Hancock, Race, and Empire’, in C.Hall and K.McClelland (eds), Race, Nation and Empire. Making Histories 1750 to the Present’ (Manchester)
2010 `South Africa: Paradoxes in the Place of Race’, in Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of The History of Eugenics (Oxford),274-288.
2011` South Africa and South Africans: Nationality, Belonging, Citizenship’ opening chapter in The Cambridge History of South Africa, Volume 2 (Cambridge), 17-65
2011 `Macmillan, Verwoerd, and the 1960 “Wind of Change” Speech’, Historical Journal 54, 4 (2011), 1087-1114
My current projects include a general history of apartheid, A brief history of human rights in South Africa (forthcoming Jacana and Ohio University Press, 2012) and an edited reader on colonial knowledge systems (forthcoming Ashgate).
I am supervising doctoral students working on varied themes, including: the history of black consciousness in South Africa; interwar British government views of Europe and Empire; Perceptions of aerial bombing; Connections between the white right in the United States and South Africa; and British soldiers' views of race and difference during WW2 (focussing on SE Asia).
Professor Dubow is Chair of the Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies and co-director of the Centre for Colonial and Post-Colonial Studies at Sussex.
His teaching includes courses on the Concept of 'Race', British Imperialism, African History, and Modern South Africa.