Headed by Prof Ian Phimister, the UFS International Studies Group comprises six master’s, twelve PhD and twelve postdoctoral fellows who concentrate their research endeavours on African, Imperial and Global History. All of these students are top achievers drawn from South Africa, Southern and Central Africa and even further afield. This group, now only in its third year, presents a phenomenal research output with an international reach.

In the course of the past year alone, five PhD students secured fully-funded invitations to conferences and research seminars in South Africa, Britain, as well as the Netherlands. Our researchers have been publishing articles globally and securing visiting fellowships and research awards.

Dr Clement Masakure and Dr Rosa Williams won funding to present papers at the International Network for the History of Hospitals. Tinashe Nyamunda won a prestigious three-month Cadbury Fellowship at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Anusa Daimon has been selected as a 2015 Harry Guggenheim award winner, which covers workshop attendance in Nairobi, Kenya.

From among the group, twelve articles have been published or accepted for publication in refereed scholarly journals, as well as four chapters in edited books. Book reviews written by these highly-motivated graduate students, have appeared or will appear in leading national and international academic journals. Remarkably, seven book reviews appearing in one particular issue of African Studies Review, were written by this group. Four scholarly monographs have recently been published, or soon will be. One PhD student is the joint editor (with a senior Canadian academic) of a forthcoming study on Zimbabwe’s controversial Marange diamond mining industry.

Another outstanding researcher, Dr Lindie Koorts, won the award for the best debut writer at the 2014 Woordfees for her book ‘DF Malan and the Rise of Afrikaner Nationalism’ – the first non-fiction writer to achieve this. Her book now appears on the longlist for the 2015 Alan Paton Award.