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2025
Enzyme Responsive Bioinks for Breast Cancer Tumor Modelling
Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer among women worldwide.
Inflammation in cardiovascular disease: Regional differences between Sub-saharan Africa and Nothern Europe
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality and amounts to about a third of all global deaths.
Narratives and knowledges for emergent cultures of sustainability: shaping credibility, legitimacy, and implementation of shared decisions
The profound challenge of ensuring the long-term well-being and perhaps even the survival of human society within societal and bio-geo-physical planetary boundaries hinges critically on transforming collective behaviors and embedding and maintaining the changes in cultures of sustainability.
Remembering anti-colonial struggles: The politics of memory, culture and national identity in postcolonial Namibia
Against the background of memory activism and decolonial movements in Southern Africa, much discussed since the South African #RhodesMustFall movement in 2015, this project traces the complex transfigurations of anti-colonial struggle memory, culture, and citizenship in postcolonial Namibia from the late 1990s through to the early 2020s.
The Agrarian Question in the 21st Century
Since the start of my career the focus of my scholarly research has been what has been defined as the agrarian question.
The syntax of Xhosa nominals
Generative linguistic theory holds that language is shaped by principles hardwired in the human brain.
2024
A critical assessment of the quality of Community Schemes Ombud Service (CSOS) adjudications (judgments) in sectional title schemes and recommendations as to how the quality of the adjudications can be improved
On 17 October the South African government introduced a Community Schemes Ombud Service for the swift and inexpensive resolution of disputes in community schemes of which sectional title schemes are the most important.
A new evolutionary perspective on the nature of the individual
The evolution of individuality was first systematically addressed in a very influential book by Leo Buss in 1987.
A New Path to Welfare: Rights and Constitutionalism in the Global South
The rise of neoliberalism caused a ‘lost decade’ of development in large parts of the global South.
Against Isolation: Transnationalism and Literary Dialogue in Dutch-Afrikaans Formations
Critics on both sides of the so-called ‘Afrikaans question’ tend to characterise the language as a hyper-local, and hence insulated, socio-cultural phenomenon.
Aid flows to Africa in the context of continued global destabilising shocks, uncertainty, renewed challenges and aid dependence
Africa has been dependent on official development assistance or aid for decades.
Black Freedom from Selma to Soweto: Gender, Consciousness, and Power
Two distinct, mutually influential, and globally inspirational black freedom struggles in the last half of the twentieth century – against segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa – are largely understood through charismatic leadership.
Bringing Physics and Chemistry to Life: from random walks to robust organization
Hans V. Westerhoff will put together the theoretical foundations of today’s biology in a comprehensive new theory, by researching and establishing connections between the various theoretical approaches in use.
Can South Africa use Land-based Financing for Biodiversity Conservation?
Globally there are calls for incentives for biodiversity conservation, including the mobilization of financial resources to implement biodiversity targets effectively.
Christianity and Social Thought in Contemporary African Literature
Against the background of ongoing debates about decolonisation and religion in Africa, this project examines the representation of, and engagement with Christianity in contemporary African literature.
Contemporary urbanism on three continents - a study of the city regions of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Gauteng (South Africa), São Paulo (Brasil) and Paris (France)
In ‘urban studies’, a varied area of research that crosses over many disciplines, two contemporary areas of focus that attract much attention are ‘southern urbanism’; and comparison of cities.
Crossing Boundaries in South Africa’s Divided Cities: how conviviality, creativity and co-operation helped undermine apartheid
Within global urban historiography there has been no detailed exploration of the nature and consequences of mingling across ethnic, racial or national boundaries in cities strongly socially and spatially divided along such as Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem or Johannesburg.
Democratized Precision Diagnostics
Modern medicine aims to improve our current abilities to diagnose and treat human diseases via a more personal health assessment.
Developing molecular tools to study genetics codes using single-cell genomics
The ability to characterize cell types and their genetic programs across tissues, have profoundly accelerated through the development of single-cell sequencing methods.
Echoes: A Collection of Historical Short Stories (working title)
This project looks back at history via the short story genre.
Extending the concept of local adaptation
Most species occur in subdivided (fragmented) populations.
From Africans to Blacks: The Making of a Racial Identity in Contemporary France
The purpose of this project is to analyze the construction of black identity in 21st - century France.
Genocide and Hope: Studies in the Architecture of Oppression and the Redemptive Possibilities of Nonviolence
I have conceptualized a work encompassing four distinct yet related books, each around 150 pages long, tentatively entitled the Genocide and Hope Quartet, and comprised of the following parts: Dandi; Auschwitz; Hiroshima; and Robben Island.
Germline specification and its role in epigenetic inheritance of diseases
The germline functions to perpetuate life and relay genetic and epigenetic information across generations.
God’s Creolization. A Regionally Sensitive Reconceptualization of the Religious History of Israel and Judah in the Iron Age
In this project, for the first time, the history of early Israelite Religion is based on the results of historical research on the emergence and development of the two states Judah and Israel.
Inhospitable Places: Feminist Thinking on Whiteness, Men, and Various Kinds of Women in South African contexts
Inhospitable Places is a feminist project that works with thinking about race, gender and class in contemporary South African contexts.
Israel’s Forgotten Invasion: An International History of the 1982 Lebanon War
Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was a formative moment in Middle Eastern and international history, reshaping Israeli and Lebanese politics, society, and culture; the fate of Palestinian self-determination; diaspora Jewish attachments to Zionism; and Western policy across the Arab world.
Legal Prostitution: A Crime Against Humanity?
Despite extensive social science research documenting the coercion and damage attendant and endemic to the sex industry and decades of legal debate on approaches to this problem, no effective legal challenges have resulted.
Leila Aboulela: Writing Women, Writing Islam
This is a book-length biography of Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela (b.
Life cycle sustainability assessment of (de)centralized power grids
Many parts of Africa are today not connected to an electricity grid.
Local adaptation of parasite off-host stages
Human-caused changes are affecting the environment in ways that challenge many organisms, including parasites.
Losing the Lustre: The End of Gold in South Africa
Gold dominated South Africa for a century.
Migration: An economist’s historical perspective
This project provides a historical perspective on migration, demonstrating that it is the defining feature of our species, without which homo sapiens would not have thrived and populated our planet.
Modelling and simulation of actuators based on bio-inspired self-sustained electronic oscillators
Bioinspiration is the use of physical and technological principles to design devices working almost as biological entities (from the animal and vegetal species).
Neuron diversity and vulnerability in neurodegenerative disease
Neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, are devastating disorders affecting millions worldwide.
New approaches to anti-obesity therapeutics – Part 2
Obesity is a medical condition defined as the excessive accumulation of fat that presents a risk to human health.
Open Data in the Age of Generative AI
In recent decades nations around the world have begun to open up significant amounts of the non-personal data they generate, gather and hold.
Reasoning in Physics: The Bayesian Approach
This project addresses the question of what constitutes good scientific reasoning.
Restitution of Gains from Profit-making Wrongs
The law of unjustified enrichment is about achieving corrective justice, and the aim of my project is about developing a more perfect way of attaining this goal by investigating the phenomenon of enrichment flowing from the invasion of another’s rights.
Storying the blue Anthropocene from the oceanic South: oscillating and turbulent perspectives on the planetary crisis
This project seeks new critical and creative perspectives on the planetary crisis in forms of storytelling from the global South and the southern hemisphere that address the oceanic and hydrological effects of the Anthropocene.
Sustainability, international trade and digitalisation: Core elements of sustainable soil management governance in the Global South
Based on the results of a previously terminated project Mapping out options for a model legislation on sustainable soil management in Africa, a model legislation for sustainable soil management is currently under development, for adoption by the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) and subsequent transmission as a proposal to all national parliaments of the African Union.
The “social work” of work: Gendered dependencies of rural livelihoods in southern Africa
While policy-makers and international development practitioners in southern Africa put a great weight on supporting job creation given several decades of jobless growth in the region, there is less attention on how women and men are both differentially situated in labour relations and how they differentially make claims on resources that come from work activities through, for example, idioms of kinship, family, patronage, or friendship.
The coloniality and necropolitics of nuclear sacrifice zones: The case of South Africa’s nuclear waste disposal site, Vaalputs
A key feature of the Anthropocene is the production of nuclear waste.
The interface between South African publishing, authors, the academy, and anglophone publishing elsewhere in Africa: a personal retrospective
Surprisingly little is known about how the South African publishing industry has operated over the past 35 politically tumultuous years.
The Martyr: A Graphic Comic Novel that explores the link between economic inequality, marginalization and violent extremism and radicalization in East Africa
The Martyr traces the story of Omar, a young Kenyan man and a talented sculptor who joins the Al-Shabaab after being innocently arrested in a police swoop and locked up for two years.
Urbanist at Large: Iterating an Urban Sensibility
The STIAS Fellowship will be used to define a new field of research for the next four years.
Wetting phenomena in nature and in artefact
Wetting phenomena are ubiquitous in nature and in our manufactured technological environment.
Where Does The Air Go?: Making a Women's Opera
My project involves writing a song cycle to form the basis of an opera, Where Does The Air Go?