Prof Pamela Maseko

Prof Pamela Maseko

Professor Pamela Maseko is the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Nelson Mandela University in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. The Humanities Faculty at Nelson Mandela University includes disciplines in the Arts and Social Sciences.

Pamela is a Professor of Sociolinguistics and has been in the higher education sector in South Africa for about three decades. She held the position of Executive Dean at North West University and before that was a researcher at Rhodes University and at the Universities of Cape Town and the Western Cape. She is the current President of the South African Humanities Deans’ Association. 

As the current Executive Dean of the Humanities Faculty, Pamela has a responsibility of leading the development and implementation of a strategy on the Revitalisation of the Humanities, one of the academic trajectories of Nelson Mandela University. The Faculty scholarship centres around the following research and teaching themes: African Vernacular Archive and Heritage Studies, Women’s Digital Archive and Gendered Histories, Public Management, Governance and

Leadership, Arts and Entrepreneurship, Identities and Social Cohesion, and Ocean Cultures and

Heritage. Pamela is also passionate about capacity enhancement and started the Capacity Enhancement Programme (CEP) for early career academics with the purpose of enhancing expertise of black and female early career academics and transforming the demographics of staff in the Faculty. It is around the above teaching and research themes, as well as the CEP where we wish to establish partnerships with the US universities and organisations.

Pamela’s research interests include historical sociolinguistics with a focus on African languages literary archive. In her research she investigates the intellectual thoughts early African thinkers from the Eastern Cape region of South Africa to explore the language, culture, beliefs and ways of life in the Eastern Cape region at a time of early contact with Europe, and their response to political conflict in South Africa in the 19th and early 20th century. She is the PI of the African Languages Literary Heritage Research Hub presently funded by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences in South Africa. The research hub was previously funded by the AW Mellon Foundation.