My research focuses on the modern and contemporary history of South Africa, with a focus on the history of the apartheid-era bantustans.

Before joining Sheffield Hallam, I held fellowships at the University of the Western Cape and at the University of Cape Town. At SHU I teach modern South African history alongside a range of topics in modern African, colonial and postcolonial history.

My book, Survival in the Dumping Grounds: A Social History of Apartheid Relocation (Brill & UCT Press, 2019) examines the social history of forced relocation into the Ciskei bantustan at the height of the apartheid era. Based on oral history and archival research, it explores the makings and the meanings of displacement and relocation. While state relocation was coercive, and had terrible consequences for people compelled to move to rural 'dumping grounds' (as they were often called), those who came to live in the new relocation townships nevertheless remade their lives amid adversity.

More recently, I have written about the history of mass action and political violence during South Africa's transition to democracy, with a particular focus on the mass action campaign of 1992, which culminated in the tragic state massacre of peaceful demonstrators at Bhisho in September 1992. If South Africa’s transition has often been hailed as a ‘miracle’ shaped by elites at the negotiating table, my research foregrounds local dynamics of collective action, repression and conflict - not least around the future of the bantustans - that significantly shaped the national negotiations and the course of the transition to democracy.