Current Visiting Research Fellows
The Smuts Visiting Research Fellows during 2025/26 are Dr Karthick Ram Manoharan and Dr Katherine Luongo.
Dr Katherine Luongo (Centre of African Studies)
Dr Katherine Luongo is Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at Northeastern University and a specialist in the anthropological history of Kenya. Dr Luongo studies legal systems in colonial and contemporary Africa, global legal regimes, and human rights. She is the author of Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900-1955 (Cambridge University Press, 2011). With Matthew Carotenuto, she is the author of Obama and Kenya: Contested Histories of Politics and Belonging (Ohio University Press, 2016), the first scholarly work to examine the history of Kenya through the experiences of the Obama family. Her most recent monograph, African Witchcraft and Global Asylum-Seeking: Border-Crossing Beliefs (Routledge, 2023), investigates witchcraft-driven violence across Africa from the related standpoints of legal anthropology and legal history and migration and human rights studies. It analyzes how witchcraft allegations made by African asylum-seekers have interacted with the protocols of asylum-seeking on the local, national, and global levels over the last two decades and how humanitarian organizations have engaged with witchcraft-driven violence. Her current monograph project, Law without Justice: A History of Human Rights in Kenya, examines the legal history of human rights in Kenya from the 1960s into the 1990s, focusing on illegal detentions, human rights activism, political trials, and lawfare.
Dr Karthick Ram Manoharan (Centre of South Asian Studies)
Dr Soumen Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at National Law School of India. He will be working on the Indian Emergency and its implications for political theory engaging with works of and on Carl Schmitt for this project. His earlier research was on the Indian anti-caste thinker Periyar E.V. Ramasamy. He was Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellow at the University of Wolverhampton working on the research project “Freedom from Caste: The Political Thought of Periyar E.V. Ramasamy in a Global Context” funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. He received his PhD from the University of Essex in 2015 and his thesis was on the anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon. He is the author of Periyar: A Study in Political Atheism (2022) and Frantz Fanon: Identity and Resistance (2019), and the co-editor of the volumes The Cambridge Companion to Periyar (2025) and Rethinking Social Justice (2020).