Biography

I am a historian of international and transnational relations in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the history of South Africa and on South Africa’s relations with Britain, the United States, and the rest of the world.
I am currently working on my first book, The Siege of South Africa, an international history of the development and deployment of various kinds of boycotts and sanctions by the global anti-apartheid movement, from the early twentieth century until the 1970s. The project is based on research in more than 80 archival repositories in South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, Ghana, the United States, Britain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.
My manuscript-in-progress analyses how and why opponents of South Africa’s racial order chose to campaign for various kinds of boycotts and sanctions - including consumer boycotts, workers’ boycotts, sports and cultural boycotts, divestment and disinvestment, and governmental trade, financial, and diplomatic sanctions. The book explores what the consequences of those choices were, both for apartheid and the struggle against it, and for global politics.
In addition to working on this book project while I was a Max Weber Fellow, I also undertook a separate post-doctoral project on the ‘turn to violence’ by the African National Congress and its allies in South Africa in the 1960s. This project has resulted in two articles. The first, published in Past & Present, analyses why that ‘turn’ initially took the form of non-lethal symbolic sabotage (primarily bombings of empty government buildings and other installations associated with the implementation of apartheid). The second article, published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, analyses the process by which the Congress movement subsequently came to focus on rural guerrilla warfare as a free-standing and sufficient first step towards ‘all-out war’ and the armed seizure of power.
Before coming to Fiesole, I completed my Ph.D. at Columbia University in New York, and held pre-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University, New York University, and the University of Virginia. After my time as a Max Weber Fellow, I held a research fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge, and then took up my current post at the University of Sheffield.