Prof Hussein Solomon holds a D.Litt et Phil (Political Science) from the University of South Africa. Currently he is Senior Professor in the Department of Centre for Gender and Africa Studies (CGAS), University of Free State. His previous appointments include being Senior Professor in the Department of Political Sciences at the UFS, Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pretoria; Executive Director of the International Institute of Islamic Studies (2009-2010); Director of the Centre for International Political Studies, University of Pretoria, Research Manager at the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (1998-2000), Senior Researcher: Institute for Security Studies (1996-1998) and Research Fellow: Centre for Southern African Studies, University of the Western Cape (1993-1995). In 2007 and 2010 he was Visiting Professor at the Global Collaboration Centre at Osaka University in Japan and in 2008 he was Nelson Mandela Chair of African Studies at Jawahrlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. Currently he is Visiting Fellow at the MacKinder Programme for the Study of Long-Wave Events at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom.Currently he is a Visiting Professor at Osaka University and a Senior Research Associate of the Jersusalem-based think tank Research on Islam and Muslims in Africa (RIMA).

Prof Heidi Hudson (2012-2017) is Professor of International Relations and former Director of the Centre for Africa Studies at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. In October 2017, she became Acting Dean of the Faculty of the Humanities and assumed the position fulltime as of 1 March 2018. She is a member of the Committee on the Status of Women of the International Studies Association (ISA) and was a Global Fellow of the Oslo Peace Research Institute (PRIO), in Norway from 2014 to 2016. She was co-editor of International Feminist Journal of Politics and serves on several editorial boards, such as International Peacekeeping, Stichproben. Vienna Journal of African Studies, The Australasian Review of African Studies, and Politikon. Heidi co-edited Post-conflict Reconstruction and Development in Africa: Concepts, role-players, policy and practice (UCT/UNU Press, 2013), with Theo Neethling. She has published articles in, among others, Peacebuilding, Security Dialogue, Security Studies, Politics & Gender, International Peacekeeping, and African Security Review. Her current research interests concentrate on discursive and material gender deficits of liberal peacebuilding in the postcolony and related to posthuman feminism. Some of her research also focuses on the gendering of Africa’s International Relations and postcolonial/decolonial epistemic resistance. She has held several fellowships, such as Fulbright, as well as at the Nordic Africa Institute and the University of Calgary, Canada. During her tenure as director, the Centre significantly increased its international footprint, research output as well as PhD enrolments and throughput.

Prof Pamila Gupta was appointed Research Professor at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, affiliated with the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies (CGAS) in January 2023. She was formerly Full Professor based at WiSER at the University of the Witwatersrand (2008-2022). She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her research and writing interests include Portuguese colonial and Jesuit missionary history in India; diasporas, islands, tourism, heritage and design in the Indian Ocean; photography, tailoring and visual cultures in East Africa; and architecture, infrastructure, and affect in South Africa.  She is the co-editor of Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (with Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson, UNISA 2010) and author of three monographs: The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India (Manchester UP, 2014); Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019); and Heritage and Design: Ten Portraits from Goa (India) (Cambridge UP, 2022). She has a forthcoming edited volume with Sarah Nuttall, Esther Peeren and Hanneke Stuit entitled Planetary Hinterlands: Abandonment, Extraction, and Care that will be published with Palgrave’s Series on ‘Globalization, Culture and Society’ (2023). She is currently working on a new book manuscript entitled Experiments in the Dark: Visualizing Capital Art Studio (Zanzibar).