Mucha Musemwa is a Professor of History and the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg with effect from 1 January 2023. Prior to this appointment he was the Head of the School of Social Sciences in the same Faculty for almost 6 years. He has a BA Honours (University of Zimbabwe); MA (University of Cape Town) and a PhD obtained jointly from the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Global Change and the Department of History at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. He has received several prestigious fellowships including the British Academy Visiting Fellowship (2006) at Sheffield University, UK. Ernest Oppenheimer Fellowship (2008), University of Oxford, the Carnegie Corporation Large Research Grant (2010), Wits University African Studies Centre, the African Presidential Fellowship (Aug. 2014-Jan. 2015) at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is an NRF-Rated scholar with a B-rating. Most recently he was inducted as a Member of the Academy of the Sciences of South Africa (MASSAf). He is a past President of the Southern African Historical Society, a former editor of the South African Historical Journal. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Water History Journal and the Environment and History journal; serves on the executive boards of directors of the African Studies Association; the International Consortium of Environmental History Organisations; the European Society for Environmental History; and the International Water History Association.

 

He has published widely on environmental history and on water history and politics in Zimbabwe. He is the author of Water, History, and Politics in Zimbabwe: Bulawayo’s Struggles with the Environment, 1894-2008 (2014). He co-edited (with Sarah Chiumbu) Crisis! What Crisis? The Multiple Dimensions of the Zimbabwean Crisis (2012); He is one of the guest editors (with Allen Isaacman and Harry Verhoeven), Special Issue on the theme: “Water Security in Africa in the Age of Global Climate Change”, Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Volume 150, No. 4, (Fall 2021). He recently published a chapter: “Land, water and race: The Search for Truth and the search for environmental justice in Southern Rhodesia,” in Graeme Wynn, Jane Carruthers, and Nancy Jacobs, and Environment, Power, and Justice in Southern Africa: Southern African Histories, (Ohio University Press, 2022), pp. 255-278; and another one: “From ‘Nature Study’ to ‘Nature’s Archives’: Reflections on a Journey into Environmental History.” Cynthia Kros, John Wright, Mbongiseni Buthelezi and Helen Ludlow (eds). Ezakudala/Tsa Kgale: Exploring the Archive of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa’s Deep History (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2022), pp. 143-155.