Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, the 2024 Templeton Prize Laureate, is the South African National Research Foundation’s Research Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma and the Director of the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ) at Stellenbosch University. She is an engaged scholar with interests extending beyond her academic specialty and she has delivered many public lectures, keynote and endowed lectures internationally. She has won several academic awards, which include the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, an honorary Doctor of Theology from the Friedrich-Schiller University, and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Rhodes University. Her critically acclaimed book A Human Being Died that Night, which has been reprinted as a Mariner Books Classic, has won the Alan Paton Prize in South Africa, and the Christopher Award in the United States. She has published scholarly and popular articles on themes of perpetrators and victims of historical trauma, and edited and co-edited several book volumes on transgenerational trauma, historical trauma and memory.
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E-mail: pumlagm@sun.ac.za | Tel: 021 808 4017
Current Research Project
My current project is in two phases. In Phase I, I return to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) archive as a “research site” and engage a fine-grained analysis of a select group of TRC testimonies organised around specific moments of the TRC. A question that will provide structure and guide this process is how might the TRC process and South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy shed light on the problem of violence in contemporary South Africa? In Phase II of the project, I will build on my earlier work on remorse and forgiveness to explore what I have termed “reparative humanism.”
Select Publications
Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (Forthcoming). A Taboo of Historical Burden: The Posthumous Apology by Apartheid’s Last President. In G. Langfield & J. Jaffe-Schagen (eds.), Taboo in Cultural Heritage: Reverberations of Colonialism and National Socialism.
Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (2025). Forgiveness is ‘the wrong word’: Empathic Repair and the Potential for Human Connection in the Aftermath of Historical Trauma. In Alternative Approaches in Conflict Resolution, 163-175. Springer Nature.
Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (2024). The Time of Nachträglichkeit and the Afterlife of Apartheid
Trauma. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 105(5), 766-777
Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (2023). The afterlife of apartheid: A Triadic Temporality of Trauma.
Social Dynamics, 1(49), 67-86.
Connolly, M., Gobodo-Madikizela, P., Layton, L., Nichols, B., Pivnick, B. & Reading, R.
(2022). What’s Repaired in Reparations: A Conversation Among Psychoanalytic and Social
Activists. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 32(1), 3-16.
Durbach, A., Bennett, J., & Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (2022). Designing Reparations: Creative process as reparative practice. The big anxiety: Taking care of mental health in times of crisis, 153-165.
Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (2021). Remorse as ethical encounter and the impossibility of repair. In S. Tudor, R. Weisman, M. Proeve, & K. Rossmanith (Eds), Remorse and criminal justice: Multi-disciplinary perspectives, 243-266. Routledge.