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Meet the Cape Town Faculty

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Classes offered by the Cape Town Program are taught by local faculty, the Center Director and by one Stanford Faculty-in-Residence per quarter. 

Faculty in Residence

Each quarter, one Stanford professor serves as Faculty in Residence in each of the BOSP program locations. These faculty teach classes in their own disciplines, developing courses that incorporate unique features of the local culture and environment or that provide comparative perspectives on a particular topic. View a list of current and future faculty.

Local Faculty

Prof. Mohamed Adhikari

Prof. Adhikari is a Professor of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. His teaching has focused on African, South African and economic history, and more recently on African genocide and its racial elements. His scholarship focuses on racial identity in South Africa’s coloured society and settler colonialism and genocide. He has published prolifically in this area. 

Prof. John Parkington

Prof. Parkington is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cape Town. His research and teaching interests include hunter gathers, Southern African prehistory, human ecology and palaeo-environments, archaeological method and theory, prehistoric rock art, and coastal archaeology. John is founding trustee of the Clanwilliam Living Landscape Project, a community-based initiative to create jobs and community education through practical utilization of archaeological research.

Prof. Ulrike Rivett 

Prof. Ulrike Rivett was born in Germany and did her undergraduate degree in geomatics engineering at the University of Munich.  She moved in 1995 to South Africa for her PhD studies at the University of Cape Town which were based on a collaborative project with the Getty Conservation Institute Los Angeles, US, to digitize the Laetoli Footprints in the Serengeti. This interdisciplinary project between IT and archaeology resulted in her focus on research where IT can assist to further the goals of other disciplines. In 2000, she was employed at UCT as a lecturer in the Department of Geomatics and started working in the field of ICT for development. Her focus changed towards the use of IT in addressing the challenges of HIV/AIDS and she started with a group of students and colleagues an NGO to develop mobile phone-based application to support HIV positive people during their treatment. In 2011 she started iCOMMS, a research group who investigates the use of ICT in the water and sanitation sector. She has worked on projects with the Gates Foundation, the World Bank, the German Academic Exchange program and the South African Water Research Commission. She has published widely in the field of ICT for development and has also received a number of awards for her work with communities and the innovative use IT applications. Since 2018 she is the Director of the newly founded School of IT at UCT.

Dr. Helen Scanlon 

Dr Helen Scanlon is the convener of the Justice and Transformation Program in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. Between 2012 and 2015 she was the head of the Gender Studies Department at UCT. Until 2011 she was the Director of the International Center for Transitional Justice’s (ICTJ) Gender Justice Program where she worked as a practitioner on issues of justice and post-conflict transformation. Before joining ICTJ, Helen was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Conflict Resolution in South Africa, working on peace-building in Africa. She holds a Ph.D. in South African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Her book Representation and Reality: Portraits of Women’s Lives examines gender and politics in South Africa during apartheid.  She has published widely on the subject of gender, peacebuilding and transitional justice in Africa.