Dr Hilary Sapire

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 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

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

6

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

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Jun 2019 onwards

• CONRAD COMPAGNA

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2020 onwards

• LUKE SPYROPOULOS

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2021 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  Greek immigration and Settlement in Southern Africa: a history of capital, race and mobility in the British empire

  Description:

  This is a study of the history of immigration and its governance systems in the late British Empire in Africa and its successor states with a view to understanding the role of emergent racial classification systems in that history. The study will use the example of Greek immigration in the region of southern Africa as a lens with which to study these phenomena. This lens is important because of the non-imperial nature of the migrants, their (waning) racial ambiguity in the period under study and the importance of local settler politics in the region.

• THOMAS CRIPPS

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Jan 2021 onwards

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• AMELIA CLEGG

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2014

  Title of thesis:

  The British Army, the Regimental Officer, and the South African War: Command, Leadership, and Professionalism in the Coldstream Guards Middle Echelon (1899-1902)

  Awarded:

  2023

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

• Theorising Gender (FDGD009S7)
• Africa Imagined: Visions of a Continent, 1600-2000 (HICL001S7)
• Mastering Historical Research: Birkbeck Approaches (SSHC247S7)
• Research Skills for Historians (SSHC386Z7)
• The Modern World (SSHC411S4)

Publications