Prof Stephanie Cawood (PhD), former Director of the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies from July 2019 to April 2026 and Acting Director from October 2017 was one of the longest serving directors of the CGAS to date. A founding member of the Centre established in November 2007, she also served as Programme Director of the Programme for Africa Studies from January 2012 to July 2019. She obtained her PhD in 2011 with her thesis on the rhetorical imprint of Nelson Mandela. She is an interdisciplinary scholar working across matters of memory, culture, heritage, rhetoric, the oral tradition, indigenous knowledge, and gender in Africa. Her work has demonstrated a particular contextual focus on different forms of liberation struggles in Africa whether political, social or epistemic. Prof Cawood is experienced in interdisciplinary scholarship and from 2008 to 2010 successfully led a National Heritage Council-funded research project on informal sacred sites and pilgrimage movements in the eastern Free State in South Africa encapsulating the ecological memory and spirituality involved but also focusing on the environmental interface of cultural and water use values at these sites. She has also worked on the memorialisation of struggle and the dynamics of memory, space, and power in postliberation Africa. Recently, her work has taken a further spatial turn to incorporate mountain epistemes comparing the southern Appalachian and Maloti-Drakensberg mountains with colleagues from the Qwaqwa campus of the UFS and Appalachian State University in the USA. She has taught in the Africa and Gender Studies programmes where she is involved in the supervision of postgraduate students and has successfully graduated over 30 postgraduate students from honours through to doctoral level. In 2013, she went to the University of Bologna on a staff exchange (EUROSA) and, in 2016, took up a visiting research fellowship at the African Studies Centre Leiden. From 2016-2019, she was awarded a Newton Advanced Fellowship from the British Academy and Newton Fund in collaboration with Prof Jonathan Fisher from the University of Birmingham to pursue research titled, The memorialising of struggle and the dynamics of memory, space, and power in post-liberation Africa. From 2008-2010 and again from 2018-2019, Prof Cawood collaborated with Dr Tascha Vos (Centre for Environment Management at UFS) on an interdisciplinary project called, ‘Testing the Waters’: The application of the Rapid Integrity Appraisal (RIA) model to Mohokare informal heritage sites. From 2021-2022, she also guest edited a special edition in the journal, Acta Academica, titled, Xenophobia in Africa, in collaboration with Prof Peter Olapegba from the University of Ibadan (Published Nov 2022). She is also an associate editor of the Q2 journal, Africa Review, published by Brill.

• • Cawood, S. & Mushonga, M. 2026. Gendered dynamics in African borderlands. In: O. Walther, I. Moyo and I. Soi (Eds.). Routledge Handbook of African Borderlands. New York and London: Routledge. Ch 25. ISBN 9781032857794.
  • Cawood, S., Magaiza, G., Shepherd-Powell, J. & McKensie, T. 2025. Comparative mountain epistemes: Exploring the Maloti-Drakensberg and Southern Appalachians. Transformations Special Issue: African Mountainscapes and the Anthropocene, 117(2025): 28-57. 
  • Mushonga, M. & Cawood, S. 2024. ‘You have to pay with your body’: The precarity of subaltern Basotho migrant women within the Lesotho-South Africa border(land)s. In: M. Mushonga, J. Aerni-Flessner, C. Twala and G. Magaiza (Eds.). Migration, Borders and Borderlands: Making National Identity in Southern African Communities. Lanham: Lexington Books. ISBN 9781666942811 (ebook).
  • Human, C., Cawood, S., & Van As, L.L. 2023. IKS and gendered ecologies: The Okavango Panhandle in context. Africa Review (published online ahead of print 2023). (IBSS, Scopus).
  • Cawood, S. 2023. Rising to the occasion? Appraising the rhetoric of selected African Presidents in their response to COVID-19. African Journal of Rhetoric, 15: 344-374. [Special issue: Rhetoric inthe Time of Covid 19: Global African Perspectives] (SA DHET).
  • Cawoods, S. and Fisher, J. 2022. “It should be a constant reminder”: Space, meaning and power in post-liberation Africa. Political Geography, 99(2022): 102782. (Open Access, Norwegian List, WoS, Scopus, IBSS, Impact Factor 4.1).
  • Cawoods, S. and Olapegba, P (Guest editors). 2022. Xenophobia in Africa. Acta Academic Special Issue, 54(20): 1-5. [Introduction]. (DOAJ/SA DHET).
  • Cawood, S. & Vos, A.T. 2021. Water and heritage: Saving sacred waters: The future of the Mohokare Valley sacred sites and water resources. The Water Wheel, 23(3): 28-31. (Popular science article, Scopus). 
  • Cawood, S. 2016. Violence in/and the Great Lakes: The thought of V-Y Mudimbe and Beyond. By Grant Ferrad, Kasereka Kavwahiri and Leonhard Praeg (eds.). Acta Academica, 48(2): 151-153. (DOAJ/SA DHET).
  • Cawood, S. & Vos, A.T. 2016. Water quality as bio-cultural screening indicator for the integrity of informal heritage sites. Water SA, 42(4): 516-526. (WoS, ScIELO).
  • Cawood, S. 2014. The ‘Recalcitrant Other’: The rhetorical identity and struggle of Nelson Mandela. Africa Insight 44(1): 38 – 50. (SA DHET).
  • Cawood, S. 2014. The rhetoric of ritual: Sacred sites and the oral tradition in the Mohokare Valley. In: P. Post, P.J. Nel & W. van Beek (Eds.). Sacred Spaces and Contested Identities: Space and Ritual Dynamics in Europe and Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Chapter 11: pp 203-224. ISBN 9781592219544.
  • Cawood, S. & Moephuli, J. 2014. Site descriptions of the sacred sites of the eastern Free State.In: P. Post, P.J. Nel & W. van Beek (Eds.). Sacred Spaces and Contested Identities: Space and Ritual Dynamics in Europe and Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Addendum: pp 27-38. ISBN 9781592219544.
  • Cawood, S. & De Wet, J.C. 2014. The rhetorical imprint from a constructivist perspective. Communitas, 19(2014): 60 – 79. (SA DHET).
  • Vos, A.T & Cawood, S. 2010. The impact of water quality on informally declared heritage sites: A preliminary study. Water SA Young Water Professionals Special Edition 2010, 36(2): 185-192. (WoS, ScIELO).