Skip to main content

Dr Hilary Sapire

  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    I grew up in South Africa and studied at the universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand. I have been teaching at Birkbeck College since 1991, following a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. I am a past editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies and member of its Editorial Board.

  • Research

    Research

    Research overview

    Having published articles on African urbanization, the making of the apartheid city and the political cultures of South African townships, I co-wrote a book on the tragic encounter between an isiXhosa African prophet, Nontetha Nwenkwe and the psychiatric profession in South Africa during the interwar years. I have co-edited a book and journal special issue on the history of Southern African liberation movements and the global anti-apartheid movement. Drawing on Leverhulme Trust funded-research, I am currently completing a book on royal tours of Southern Africa, popular monarchism and the ambiguities of empire loyalism, and I am collaborating on a book project with Dr Cindy McCreery of University of Sydney, on ‘Violence, honour and memory in the colonial Cape and Natal: Prince Alfred’s tour of 1860’. The courses I offer in the Department reflect my interests in African history, global history; colonial and post-colonial history’ and modern South Africa

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    I have supervised doctoral students working on: Black British engagement with the Anti-Apartheid Movement; sport and the Edwardian Empire; liberal opposition politics in apartheid South Africa; Umkhonto we Size; the history of the University of Ibadan; gender and international solidarity with the anti-apartheid movement; and nineteenth-century Cape history. I am currently supervising dissertations on Protestant missionaries in South Asia and West Africa, and on the South African War.

    Current doctoral researchers

    • ANN COTTERRELL
    • CONRAD COMPAGNA
    • LUKE SPYROPOULOS
    • THOMAS CRIPPS

    Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

    • AMELIA CLEGG

    Teaching

    Undergraduate:

    • Britannia’s Embrace: The British Empire and the World
    • Colonial Encounters: Race, Identity and Cultural Exchange in the British Empire
    • The Colonial Gaze – Western Perceptions of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 1600-1960
    • Empires in Comparative Perspective

    Postgraduate:

    • Disease and Society in Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
    • Africa in the European Imagination
    • Apartheid: Culture Politics and Society

    Teaching modules

    • Healing, Health and Modernity in African History (HICL035S7)
    • Research Skills for Historians (SSHC386Z7)
    • The Colonial Gaze: Western Perceptions of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 1600-1960 (SSHC393S6)
    • Exploring the Past (SSHC407S5)
    • The Modern World (SSHC411S4)
    • Decolonising History/Histories of Decolonisation (SSHC528S7)
  • Publications

    Publications

    Article

    Book

    Book Section

    Editorial