Prof Chitja Twala is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Free State (UFS), Bloemfontein Campus. He holds a PhD in History from the UFS. Prof Twala has a substantial publication record on the history of the liberation movements, with special reference to the African National Congress in the Free State. He is the author of six chapters and co-authored two in The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Vol. 4 (1970-1990) and the Road to Democracy in South Africa: Vol. 6 (1990-1996) published in 2010 and 2013 respectively. He has presented more than 30 papers both nationally and internationally.

Prof Twala was part of the first group of the UFS Vice-Chancellor’s Prestige Scholarship Programme (PSP). He is currently collaborating with Prof Peter Limb (Michigan State University) on a book project on the history of the ANC in the Free State. Prof Twala has published in numerous peer-reviewed articles in local and international journals. He serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal for Contemporary History, Yesterday and Today Journal, and South African Journal of Cultural Studies.

From August to December 2015 he was a South Africa/Harvard University Fellow (in the US) and conducted research on the liberation movements. He has presented papers and undertaken research in the following countries, to name a few: Britain, Singapore, Finland, Greece, US, Japan, Zambia, Lesotho, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Senegal.

He has been invited as the keynote speaker at the following universities: Appalachian University in Boone (US); James Madison University in North Carolina (US); University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) in the US; Michigan State University (US); Howard University in Washington (US); Osaka University (Japan); Russian Institute of African Studies (Moscow) and Stanford University (US). He is the external examiner at a number of universities in South Africa, including the University of the Witwatersrand, University of Venda, Sol Plaatje and the North-West Universities.

Prof Twala has received the following awards:

• The National Research Foundation
• New frontier in Poverty Reduction and Sustainable Development Funding
• Recipient of the Graduate School for Arts and Sciences at the University of Harvard
• US Recipient of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Grant
• Awarded the Mellon Foundation Scholarship from 2016-2018