2025 - 2026 | Professor June Bam

June Bam is Professor and director of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. An internationally accomplished scholar, she has worked widely in the interdisciplinary field of African history - for Stanford University, University of York (Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past), and Kingston University. At the University of Cape Town, she was Associate Professor in African Feminist Studies, head of African Studies, founding director of the San and Khoi Research Centre, and Principal Investigator of two international heritage and history research projects involving a number of universities and senior researchers globally.

Her collaborative work Turning Points in History earned South Africa the 2008 UNESCO Peace Education Award; her co-edited book (lead editor), Whose History Counts: Decolonising Pre-colonial Historiography (2018) was runner up of South Africa’s National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) Best Edited scholarly Volume 2020 award; and her book, Ausi Told Me: Why Cape Herstoriographies Matter (2021),  joint winner of the 2023 NIHSS Best Non-fiction Monograph award. Two of her completed co-authored research volumes respectively in the history of education, global south and indigenous knowledges (one with Brazilian scholars translated in Portuguese) are currently under publication.