The Smuts Visiting Research Fellows during 2024/25 are Dr Elizabeth Elbourne, Dr Miles Tendi and Dr Soumen Mukherjee.   

Dr Elizabeth Elbourne (Centre of African Studies) 

Elizabeth Elbourne is a historian of Britain, the British empire, South Africa and colonial North America. She has particular interests in the history of settler colonialism; the history of transnational humanitarianism and debates about Indigenous rights; comparative Indigenous history; borderlands violence; and the history of religion. Her geographic focus includes South Africa, the history of colonial North America and the interplay between domestic Britain and the British empire. She is currently working on a history of relationships between hunter-gatherers and the British in the early nineteenth-century, with attention to the San in southern Africa and Haudenosaunee in northeastern North America including British cultural conceptions of hunting and of racial theory set against the background of violent conflict over resources in colonial borderlands. She is also interested in the role of kinship in the British empire and the history of families; in past work she has sought to bring together Haudenosaunee conceptions of the politics of kinship with diverse British views. She is developing further work in the history of housing and debates about “rent” in Britain and the settler empire, also tied to ideas about the politics of domesticity and family. She served as Joint Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of British Studies from 2010-2015. She is currently coediting with Dr. Shino Konishi of the University of Western Australia volume III (on 1750-1914) of the five-volume Cambridge History of Colonialism and Decolonization (forthcoming, 2027). Another project she is pursuing at Cambridge is a micro-history of four San people who performed / were displayed across Britain and their insertion into popular conceptions of evolution and racial theory before Darwin. 

Dr Miles Tendi (Centre of African Studies) 

Dr Miles Tendi is Professor of Politics in the University of Oxford's Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) and the African Studies Centre (ASC). His research focuses on civil-military relations, intelligence, gender and politics, intellectuals and politics, biography, and the existence and uses of ‘evil’ in politics. 

He has previously held a Departmental Lectureship in African Politics in the Oxford Department of International Development (QEH) and worked as a risk consultant for Control Risks (London). 

He is the author of Fall of an African Dictator: Mugabe, a Gendered Coup and Military Power (manuscript due in 2024, under contract with Oxford University Press). ‘Army and Politics in Zimbabwe: Mujuru, the Liberation Fighter and Kingmaker’ (Cambridge University Press, 2020). ‘Making History in Zimbabwe: Politics, Intellectuals and the Media’ (Peter Lang Academic Publishers, 2010). 

Dr Soumen Mukherjee (Centre of South Asian Studies) 

Dr Soumen Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor in History at Presidency University, Kolkata. He studied history (BA Honours, Presidency College, 2002; MA, University of Calcutta, 2004), and earned his doctoral degree in the History of South Asia from the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg (2010). 

His research interests and publications are in the fields of religious and intellectual history of modern South Asia. He is the author of Religion, Mysticism, and Transcultural Entanglements in Modern South Asia: Towards a Global Religious History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), and a prize-winning first monograph titled Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia: Community and Identity in the Age of Religious Internationals (Cambridge University Press, 2017). 

His edited collections include: Empire, Religion, and Identity: Modern South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Brill, 2024); and (with Christopher Harding), a special issue titled ‘Mind, Soul and Consciousness: Religion, Science and the Psy-Disciplines in Modern South Asia’, South Asian History and Culture, 9, 3 (2018), which was subsequently reprinted as an edited volume (Routledge, 2019).