Gillian Hart

Professor in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, USA; Distinguished Professor in the Humanities Graduate Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Born in 1946 in Johannesburg, Gillian Hart received her PhD in Agricultural Economics from Cornell University in 1978. She taught at several well-known universities including Cornell, Boston, Harvard and MIT from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. She has been working at the University of California, Berkeley since 1991 where she served as Chair of the Center for African Studies (1998-2002), Professor (1996-2016) and Head Graduate Advisor (1999-2007) at the Department of Geography, Co-Chair of Development Studies (1997-2016) and Professor Emerita of the Graduate School in Geography since 2016. She is committed to promote and support Higher Education in South Africa as co-convenor for research and exchange programs between South African universities and the University of California; she has been a Distinguished Professor in the Humanities Graduate Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg since 2016. She serves as a member of international advisory boards for a number of international journals in Development Studies, Agrarian Studies and Geography, including the Journal of Agrarian Change, Development and Change, Feminist Economics, Antipode, etc. Her consultancy work and affiliations cover a wide range of geographical regions especially in Southeast Asia and various international development agencies, universities and research centers, as well as the South African government. She specializes in Political Economy, Social Theory, Critical Human Geography & Development, Gender, Labor, South Africa, South & Southeast Asia. Her major works include inter alia, Power, Labor and Livelihood: Processes of Change in Rural Java (1986); Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2002); Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony (2014) and a co-edited volume titled Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics (2013). In 2018, she was awarded the Vega Medal by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography for contributions to human geography.