Dr Emily Bridger

I am a historian of gender, violence, and memory. Much of my research focuses on these themes in South Africa over the apartheid and post-apartheid periods. I predominantly use oral history interviews to access voices excluded from archives, and to explore relationships between the past and present, and between collective and individual memory. My first book, Young Women against Apartheid: Gender, Youth and South Africa's Liberation Struggle was published by James Currey in 2021 and was awarded the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Prize and the Grace Abbott Prize from the Society for the History of Children and Youth. My current research project, 'South Africa's Hidden War', explores how sexual violence was understood, experienced, and responded to over the apartheid and post-apartheid periods. This project is funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. More about the project can be found here.

Biography:

I completed my undergraduate degree in History and International Development at Dalhousie University in Canada before reading for a MSc in African Studies at the University of Oxford. In 2013, I began my doctoral research here at Exeter under the supervision of Dr Stacey Hynd, during which I spent a year as a visiting research fellow in Johannesburg at the University of the Witwatersrand. After completing my PhD thesis in 2016, I taught at both Exeter and Plymouth University for a year before beginning my current post as Lecturer in Global and Imperial History in 2017. In January 2020 I started a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, working on the project: 'South Africa's Hidden War: Histories of Sexual Violence from Apartheid to the Present.'

Research supervision:

I am happy to supervise MA or PhD students working on:

- African history (particularly South or Southern Africa)

- Gender history (particularly colonial/global; or in relation to violence, activism, or generation)

- Oral history and/or memory

- Histories of sexual or political violence

- Histories of childhood and youth

- History of emotions