Daniel Magaziner

Dan Magaziner is a historian of 20^th century Africa. He is the author of three books: The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968 – 1977 (2010); The Art of Life in South Africa (2016) and Available Light: Omar Badsha and the Struggle to Change South Africa (2024). He received his PhD at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2007 and taught at Cornell University before coming to Yale in 2011. A specialist in intellectual and cultural history, he teaches 19^th and 20^th century African and South African history; the history of the African diaspora; global and comparative international history. He served as editor for Journal of African History and the Ohio Short Histories of Africa, as well as the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of South African History.

 

Dan is working on two book projects. One, Out of Many: A History of a South African Idea considers how South African and other thinkers from the Global South theorized non-racial and non-nationalist approaches to national identity.  In conversation with thinkers from sites in Southeast Asia, North America, and the Middle East, it traces genealogies of pluralism rooted in formerly colonized peoples’ experiences of racism and exclusion. Dan’s second book, tentatively entitled World Man from Africa: Selby Mvusi and the Future traces the intellectual itinerary of a South Africa painter, sculptor, theorist, and designer, and recovers histories of utopia from amidst the ruin of the 20^th century.