Charles van Onselen

Professor Charles van Onselen is a researcher and historian, based at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.[1] He resides in Johannesburg.

Charles van Onselen holds a B.Sc. and U.E.D. from Rhodes University, a B.A. Hons. (Wits), a D.Phil. from Oxford University and a D.Lit.(Honoris Causa) from Rhodes University.

Charles van Onselen has been the recipient of the Trevor Reese Memorial Prize for Commonwealth and Imperial History (1984) as well as the Sunday Times (Johannesburg) Alan Paton prize for non-fiction (1997) and the Herskovitz Prize of the African Studies Association of America (1997). The Fox and the Flies was short listed for the Alan Paton Prize (2008) and the Bill Venter Literary Award (2010). In 2002 and 2009 he was accorded an ‘A’ rating as a social scientist by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. This rating was reconfirmed in 2009. He has also been a Visiting Fellow at Yale University (1978), Smuts Visiting Fellow, Churchill College Cambridge (1989), Visiting Professor at the Ecole de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1991), at Magdalen College, Oxford (2005); and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (2007). In 1998 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of South Africa and, in 2012, invited to be the inaugural Oppenheimer Fellow in the W.E.B Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Studies at Harvard University. He has been a Research Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria since 1999.

One of his most notable published works is The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894–1985 (Oxford: James Currey, 1996). The book was described as a 'detailed and compelling history of the effect of South Africa's Land Laws on one man and his family'. He received the Alan Paton Award for the book in 1997. He is also well known in academic circles for his two volume pioneering social and economic history of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century Witwatersrand: New Babylon New Nineveh: Everyday life on the Witwatersand 1886–1914.

Van Onselen wrote Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of 'Nongoloza' Mathebula, 1867–1948 (Ravan Press, 1984); The story of Nongoloza has further repercussions in the South African prison gang legends as described in the excellent "The Number" by Jonny Steinberg.

His latest work, The Fox and the Flies, is published by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Random House. The Fox and the Flies provides a social, political, and economic history of the Trans-Atlantic underworld from about 1890 until 1918, the year Joseph Silver was executed by the Austro-Hungarian military. The book tracks the life of Joseph Silver, whom van Onselen speculates could have been Jack the Ripper.[2]