Deborah Posel
South African sociologist
Deborah Posel (born 1957 or 1958) is a South African sociologist who is professor emeritus at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She was the founding director of two prominent interdisciplinary research institutes, UCT's Institute for Humanities in Africa (founded 2010) and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (founded 2001). Her academic interests are primarily in the historical sociology of apartheid and the sociology of post-apartheid South Africa.
Academic background
Born in 1957 or 1958 to two academics – an applied mathematician and a historian – Posel graduated from high school at age 16. She studied philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and in 1981 began a PhD at Nuffield College, Oxford. Her dissertation was about the historical sociology of apartheid and its origins. After completing the degree, she spent stints at Oxford, at Harvard University, and at institutions in South Africa.
Academic positions
In 2001, Posel founded the interdisciplinary Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at Wits in Johannesburg. At its inception, it had received about R25 million in core donor funding for the first five years, which the Mail & Guardian called an "unprecedented" amount. Under Posel as inaugural director, the institute selected five main research areas: money, race, sexuality, crime, and the state.
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This entry incorporates text from “Deborah Posel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.