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Academic staff

Name Vuyisile Msila
Highest qualification PhD (Vista University, South Africa)
Position Professor of Public Leadership Studies; Director: Academic Research and Knowledge Hub
Contact details msilavt@unisa.ac.za
Research interests/expertise Leadership studies; change management; the politics of education; qualitative research methodology; global affairs; decolonisation; Africanisation
Teaching Leadership Studies; Change Management; Research Methodology; postgraduate supervision
Current projects Leading change in an African university; African curricula and indigenous research

Short biography

Vuyisile Msila is C2 rated by the National Research Foundation (NRF) researcher and former Fulbright Fellow at Michigan State University (1999). He is the former Head of Unisa's Institute for African Renaissance Studies (Iars), and served as Director of the Change Management Unit at Unisa. At present, he is Professor of Public Leadership Studies at the TM-School (Unisa). In 2013, he earned the Chancellor's Prize for research. His latest academic book, published in 2020, is entitled Developing teaching and learning in Africa: Decolonising perspectives. Other books include A place to live: Red Location and its history from 1903–2013 (2014), Ubuntu: Shaping the current workplace with (African) wisdom (2015), and Africanising the curriculum: Indigenous perspectives and theories (2017). He was a research team member on the National Department of Education (DoE) Zenex/ACE School Management and Leadership Research (2007–2011), as well as the Evaluation of Warwick Africa Programme. Msila is also a biographer and creative writer, with his latest poetry anthology, Violent lullabies, published in 2021. A regular columnist in independent newspapers, he has published widely in several research journals. His areas of specialisation include leadership and management, decolonisation, Africanisation, curriculum theory and development, as well as the politics of education. Msila serves as editorial board member of 16 journals, and as an active journal reviewer for 15 journals. From 2017 he had been an adjudicator for the prestigious South African Literary Awards (Sala). He has also served as a board and council member of the Films and Publications Board, as well as Luthuli Museum, and is a regular keynote speaker in South Africa and abroad.

Selected publications