​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Kim Wale is a senior post-doctoral fellow in Studies in Historical Trauma and Transformation at the University of Stellenbosch. Her work focusses on collective memories of violence and racial oppression. She is interested both in tracing the transgenerational repercussions of these histories as well as exploring collective possibilities for working through these traumatic legacies. She is presently leading the analysis of a large dataset on memories of violence and transgenerational transmission of trauma in South Africa, one of the flagship research projects of Studies in Historical Trauma and Transformation, which is funded by the A. W. Mellon Foundation. Her forthcoming book, co-edited with Pumla Gobodo Madikizela and Jeffrey Prager, Post-Conflict Hauntings: Transforming Memories of Historical Trauma will be published in 2020 by Palgrave Macmillan.

Prior to her post-doctoral fellowship, Kim held the position of project leader of the South African Reconciliation Barometer Survey at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. In 2014 she received her PhD from the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, where she was fully funded on a Commonwealth Scholarship. Her first major book titled South Africa's Struggle to Remember: Contested Memories of Squatter Resistance in the Western Cape was published by Routledge in 2016. Kim has published her work in a number of academic articles, books, book chapters, research reports and opinion pieces. She has also presented at local and international conferences, and organised and facilitated public dialogues and workshops.

Dr. Khan Touseef Osman is a postdoctoral researcher in Studies in Historical Trauma and Transformation Studies at Stellenbosch University. He did his PhD on “Trauma Studies and South Asian Partition Fiction” at the University of Kashmir, India. His research interests include Trauma and Memory Studies, Partition Studies and Critical Theory. His current research explores the transmission of trauma across generations and its representation in creative media. At present, Dr. Osman is working on three articles entitled “Postmemory and Imaginative Temporal Displacement in Agha Shahid Ali’s Early Poetry,” “Representational Consequences of Trauma for Post-Witness Generation Authors of Partition Fiction” and “The Struggle of Memory against Forgetting in Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron”.

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Dr Marietjie Oelofsen is a post-doctoral fellow at the Historical Trauma and Transformation Studies Unit. Her research focus is on how and where South Africans talk about political trauma across racial and generational divides, and the possibilities that exist for healing or recovery through mediating diverse experiences in the public sphere. In 2017, Oelofsen received a PhD from Rhodes University for her thesis, Hearing the citizens: Inequality, access to journalists and the prospects for inclusively mediated spaces of political deliberation in South Africa. This followed an MPhil (cum laude) at the University of Stellenbosch in which she proposed a re-conceptualisation of the way in which journalists consider their professional role in order to raise possibilities for more inclusive public and political conversations. Marietjie worked as a journalist in South Africa for 11 years, and as a development communication specialist in the HIV /AIDS sector on the African continent for almost two decades.’

E-mail: oelofsenm@gmail.com​ | Click here for publications

Dr Emery Kalema is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Studies in Historical Trauma and Transformation at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He holds a PhD in History from the University of the Witwatersrand (2017). His research interests include power and politics, body and embodiment, violence, memory, trauma and suffering, as well as the postcolony. He is currently working on a book project, based on his doctoral dissertation, tentatively entitled, “Violence and Memory: The Mulele 'Rebellion' in Postcolonial Congo." The book focuses on the “imaginaries of suffering" and the relationship between power, memory, and suffering. He is also planning to conduct a set of philosophical reflections around the theme Memory as Freedom and Right.

E-mail: kalemamasua@yahoo.fr​ | Click here for publications