Welcome to the Department of History at Stellenbosch University. We are a community of scholars, educators, postgraduate and undergraduate students located in the winelands of South Africa, with research fellows from around the world.
Passionate and innovative
undergraduate teaching and
postgraduate supervision lie at the heart of our department's mission. If you are joining us as an undergraduate student we will expect you to read a lot, engage in class and in tutorials, and learn the fundamental chronological framework. We help you grasp today's terrifying, exciting world and we even help you understand yourself a bit better, by exploring the historical forces that contour your life.
Future employers want to hire humans who can read, write persuasively, make a solid argument buttressed with evidence, and interpret both critically and creatively. We will help you develop these abilities.
Our undergraduates go on to find careers in journalism, politics, the music industry, researching for non-governmental organisations, entrepreneurship, publishing, teaching, and filmmaking. Our postgraduate students have gone on to become lecturers and public historians.
Our scholarly reputation rests on our diverse interests: from political history and social history to the Anthropocene, to the history of ethnicities, the pre-colonial past, animal history, the history of sex, gender and feminism, the history of science and more. We have the capacity to supervise postgraduates in all these topics.
Our
lecturers have published scholarly articles and books, but also write for newspapers and appear on television, on radio and in documentaries. We engage in outreach programmes and use our research into the past to have an impact on the future. Our interests take us across southern Africa and around the world. Our range covers from the Big Bang until today.