Saul Dubow

Saul H. Dubow, (born 28 October 1959) is a South African historian and academic, specialising in the history of South Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since 2016, he has been the Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He previously taught at University of Sussex and Queen Mary, University of London.

Early life and education Dubow was born on 28 October 1959 in Cape Town, South Africa. He studied at the University of Cape Town, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1981. He then moved to England to undertake postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford. which formed the basis for his first book, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid (1989).

Academic career From 1987 to 1989, Dubow was a British Academy post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. He was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowship for 2012. In 2013, he moved to Queen Mary, University of London where he had been appointed Professor of African History.

In October 2016, it was announced that he had been elected as the next Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge in succession to Megan Vaughan. Based in the Faculty of History, he teaches courses on the history of modern South Africa, and has wide ranging research interests from racial segregation and Apartheid to intellectual history and the history of science. He delivered his inaugural lecture in November 2018, which is published as `Global Science, National Horizons: South Africa in Deep Time and Space’, Historical Journal, published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2020.

Honours Dubow is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS). He is an honorary professor of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. Editorial Board, South African Journal of Science and Journal of Southern African Studies; Chair, Management Committee, Centre of African Studies, Cambridge University.

Selected works