Professor
to teach South Africa course
South African
sociologist Wilmot James has been appointed Caltech’s Moore Visiting
Professor of History and Sociology. He will offer courses this fall and
spring on his country’s recent political history and on race and
skin color.
James’s
fall-term course, “South African Politics and Culture before and
during Its First Ten Years of Democracy,” will study key personalities,
including former president Nelson Mandela, and will explore the current
climate of economics, education, racial reconciliation, and other factors
affecting the country’s post-apartheid transition to democracy.
In the spring,
his “Racial Variation and the Evolution of Skin Color” course
will focus on the treatment of “race” over time, by Linnaeus,
Mendel, Darwin, the eugenics movement, and Nazism, through to molecular
biology and the Human Genome Sequencing Project, and will consider the
implications of the modern science of race, skin-color variation for the
sociology of race, and racism itself.
A former
dean of humanities and professor of sociology at the University of Cape
Town, James is now an executive director for social cohesion and integration
research at the Human Sciences Research Council, which conducts studies
and programs that support development in Africa. The council recently
cosponsored the African Human Genome Initiative, an international conference
on the genome project’s significance for the continent.
James has
authored or served as editor of numerous books. Most recently, he coedited
and contributed to Nelson Mandela: From Freedom to the Future, a collection
of Mandela’s most famous speeches and tributes from friends, including
his wife, Graça Machel; South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu;
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan; Bill Cosby; and Bill Clinton.
During South
Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, James served as head
of electoral information for the Western Cape. He chaired the government’s
Green Paper Task Team on International Migration and was project leader
of the Ministry of Education’s Values in Education Initiative. The
former executive director of the Institute for Democracy of South Africa,
James is a trustee of the Ford Foundation and serves on a number of other
boards. He holds a PhD in sociology and African history from the University
of Wisconsin–Madison and has held visiting positions at Yale University,
Indiana University, and the American Bar Foundation.
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