Congratulations to the Centre’s Dr Andy Cohen and Dr Rory Pilossof (University of the Free State) who have won a British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship Grant of £94,000 to study labour migration in Southern Africa. The project, titled: Labour Migration and Labour Relations in South and Southern Africa, c. 1900-2000 will run for three years. Its primary focus is to make labour data from South and southern Africa more accessible to researchers, academics and other interested parties. In doing so,  it will offer hitherto unprecedented opportunities for comparative and collaborative work. Labour migration has been of crucial importance in southern Africa for centuries, with large numbers of people having moved across the region to mines, farms and urban centres in South Africa. This continues to this day. We will, therefore, analyse the long-term impact of labour migration in southern Africa; the changes in occupational structures over the course of the twentieth century; and processes and rates of proletarianisation and the legacies of labour surpluses across the region. The resulting outputs will include an edited collection of labour data from southern Africa and a number of research articles in leading international peer-reviewed journals.

Rory will join the Centre for the History of Colonialisms as a research associate and we look forward to welcoming him to Kent for his first visit in September.