Sarah Godsell is a poet, a historian, a teacher, and a mother. She completed her PhD in the History Department at the University of the Witwatersrand, in the SARChi Chair “Local Histories and Present Realities” in 2015.
Her PhD was on the history of Hammanskraal, entitled “Blurred Borders of Belonging: Hammanskraal Histories 1942 – 2002”. Her interests have always been in history education, and she received a postdoctoral fellowship to teach History Education at the Centre for Education Practice Research at the University of Johannesburg, Soweto Campus. The #MustFall movements of 2015 and 2016 in South Africa shaped Godsell's academic worldview and her view of academia, and have had a lasting impact on her research trajectory.
She obtained a lecturer position at the Wits School of Education in 2017, which was converted into a permanent position in 2019, and she remains on staff there. Her research interests combine student voice, decolonisation of history education and the scholarship of teaching and learning, making her own classroom her primary research space.
She won the Wits University Humanities Teaching Award in 2020, and in 2023 she was awarded an NRF Thuthuka fellowship for a project on decolonising history education from teacher training into school classrooms.
She is a STIAS Iso Lomso Fellow (2025-2027) working on a project titled “Historical Feeling: Decolonising History Education”. She has published widely, but her proudest publications are her two poetry books, Seaweed Sky (2016) and Liquid Bones (2018). She is the co-founder of Impepho Press, a pan-Africanist feminist publishing company.Â
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