Prof. Dr. Sandra Swart

Sandra Swart is a professor and chair of the Department of History at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She received her PhD in modern history from Oxford University in 2001, while simultaneously obtaining an MS (with distinction) in environmental change and management, also at Oxford. Her research focus is the socio-environmental history of southern Africa, with a particular focus on the shifting relationship between humans and animals.

She is an editor of the Brill book series African and Asian Anthropocene: Studies in the Environmental Humanities, an editor of the South African Historical Journal, past president of the Southern African Historical Society, and current Co-Vice President of European Society for Environmental History. It has been her privilege to supervise 21 successful doctoral students from Botswana, Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. She has authored and co-authored over 80 peer-reviewed articles and chapters in academic books, co-authored two books, co-edited two books, and is the sole author of Riding High—Horses, Humans and History in South Africa (Witwatersrand University Press, 2010) and The Lion’s Historian: Africa’s Animal Past (Jacana, 2023).

RCC Research Project: Beasts of the Southern World: More-than-Human History and the Anthropocene

Selected Publications:

• with Emily O’Gorman, William San Martín, and Mark Carey, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024.
  
• The Lion’s Historian—Africa’s Animal Past. Johannesburg: Jacana Press, 2023.
• “Little Grey Men? Animals and Alien Kinship”, Global Environment, 16 (2023): 12–39.
• Riding High—Horses, Humans and History in South Africa. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2010.
• with Lance Van Sittert, eds. Canis Africanis—A Dog History of Southern Africa. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
• with Greg Bankoff. Breeds of Empire: The ‘Invention’ of the Horse in the Philippines and Southern Africa, 1500-1950. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press 2007.