New Smuts Fellow elected

Bruce Berman is Professor Emeritus of Political Studies and History and Director and Principal Investigator of the Ethnicity and Democratic Governance Program (EDG) at Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada.

A native of New York City, he was educated at Dartmouth College (B.A., International Relations), the London School of Economics (M.A., Social Anthropology) and Yale University (M.Phil., Ph.D., Political Science).

He has taught at Queen’s since 1971 and has held visiting appointments at the University of Nairobi, the University of Sussex, the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge, the University of Cape Town, Australian National University and the University of Melbourne.

Berman is the author, co-author and co-editor of seven books and more than fifty published papers.

His early work focused on the political economy of the colonial state in Africa and its impact on African societies. Since the early 1990s his work has focused increasingly on the development of modern African ethnicities and their political expression.

The Smuts Fellowship is awarded by the Smuts Memorial Fund at Cambridge in memory of J-C Smuts, who served as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge between 1948 and 1950 after leaving office as the Prime Minister of South Africa.

The Fellowship is also attached to a visiting fellowship at Wolfson College, where Professor Berman will be in residence from October 2012 to June 2013.

While at Cambridge, he will be working on a book that is the outcome of the EDG project entitled “The Ordeal of Modernity: the Cultural Politics of Ethnicity.”

Professor Berman has been director and principal investigator for the EDG Program since January 2006. It was the first Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI) grant received at Queen’s.

It has involved some 38 scholars in six disciplines from 20 universities in nine countries, with more than 100 affiliated graduate students.

The program ends on 30 June  2012. Through its grants, sixteen research workshops and two public conferences, the EDG program has produced fourteen volumes of research papers, including a series with UBC Press, for which Professor Berman is the General Editor.

He has served as the President of the Canadian Association of African Studies in 1990-91 and of the African Studies Association (ASA) in the U.S. in 2004-05. He represented the ASA on the American Council of Learned Societies from 2006 to 2009.

The Smuts Memorial Fund also supports a number of doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships in the social sciences and humanities relating to the countries of the Commonwealth.