Resume

Janeke Thumbran is Senior Lecturer in the History Department at Rhodes University. She has a PhD in African History from the University of Minnesota. Janeke’s research interests include the history of universities and the history of race and ethnicity in South Africa. Her monograph titled “From Stellenbosch to Pretoria: (Re)-Locating the ‘Coloured Question’ (1932-1990)” examines how the ‘coloured question’ shifted epistemologically from the Cape to the Transvaal in the 1960s through the intervention of the disciplines of social work and sociology at Stellenbosch University and subsequently at the University of Pretoria. Janeke’s second project examines the emergence of ancestral DNA testing through physical anthropology’s search for human origins in the 1930s. This project questions how the organisation of human populations into Haplo groups may reinforce and replicate aspects of the racial typology that accompanied anthropology’s search for human origins. Janeke has published in Social Dynamics, South African Historical Journal, Journal of African History and Kronos.

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