Professor Alois Mlambo, Head of Department of Historical and Heritage Studies at the University of Pretoria (UP), has been appointed by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) as a mentor in the National Doctoral Mentoring Programme. As part of a nationwide team encompassing universities across the country, he will be expected to provide mentorship to NIHSS-PhD fellows (21 students in the Faculty of Humanities) at UP and, together with his fellow mentors, help coordinate the NIHSS Doctoral Schools. The appointment also brings funding to the Faculty, through the Office of the Dean. The role played by Professor Mlambo is meant to complement rather than supplant the role of individual supervisors who are specialists in their fields.

Professor Mlambo holds a BA in English and History from the University of Canterbury, Kent, UK; an MA in African History, from the School of Oriental and African studies; an MA in American History from the Wesleyan University, Connecticut, USA and a PhD in Latin American History from Duke University, North Carolina, USA. He has taught at various universities in the USA, Nigeria and Zimbabwe and has supervised numerous master’s and PhD students, as well as several post-doctoral fellows.

He has written and/or edited seven books and published numerous articles, chapters and book reviews. He has also contributed to southern African school textbooks and has served on the editorial boards of several academic journals.

Particularly pertinent to his recent NIHSS appointment is the fact that, from 2007 to 2010, he co-ordinated a highly successful postgraduate skills training programme in the region under a joint UK-Africa Academic Partnership project that linked the History departments of the universities of Sheffield, Pretoria, Botswana, Swaziland and Zambia. From 2011 to 2014, he co-ordinated a South-South History Study Partnership project, jointly funded by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust (OMT) and the University of Pretoria. The partnership project is, a collaborative network designed to promote collaborative research, teaching staff exchanges, joint graduate supervision and, most importantly, graduate skills training workshops.