Professor Rebekah Lee

Rebekah’s research concerns the social and cultural history of modern South Africa, and latterly more broadly the history of health and medicine in sub-Saharan Africa. Interdisciplinarity is a core pre-occupation and intellectual orientation – her research explores the productive interface of history with other disciplinary traditions, most prominently anthropology but also the fields of urban studies, development studies, human geography and public health.

Rebekah has published on gender, migration, urbanisation, religion, health and the family, including the books, Health, Healing and Illness in African History (Bloomsbury, 2021), and African Women and Apartheid: Gender and Urbanisation in Southern Africa (I.B. Tauris, 2009). Her work has also appeared in interdisciplinary journals including Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, Journal of Southern African Studies, Journal of African History and Journal of Women’s History.

She is Chair of the Journal of Southern African Studies and Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Geography, Environmental Studies and Tourism at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Rebekah has held prestigious visiting fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute (Harvard University) and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies, and was formerly a Councillor of the Royal Historical Society. In 2018 she became a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. In 2013 she received the Richard Werbner Prize for Visual Ethnography from the Royal Anthropological Institute for her documentary film, ‘The Price of Death’.

Rebekah is completing her third book, Death and Memory in Modern South Africa, which is a culmination of over 15 years of research on the changing meaning and management of death in transitional and post-apartheid South Africa. Alongside Anne Heffernan, she has also edited History, Knowledge and Power: Essays in Honour of William Beinart (London: Palgrave), forthcoming in 2026. She is also undertaking a new research project, on road safety and road danger in Africa. Rebekah contributes to the OSGA's African Studies MSc programme as well as to the MPhil in Global and Area Studies.

DPhil supervisees

Emma Davies and Zaphesheya Dlamini