Prof. Paul Landau

Paul S. Landau is a Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He holds postgraduate degrees in History and African Studies from the University of Wisconsin. He is a Fellow of the University of Johannesburg, and of the Multiple Secularities consortium at the University of Leipzig. He writes about forms of power in the precolonial and colonial 19th. c. southern Africa, and more recently, the 20th century, based on indigenous and colonial sources. His current research projects include reconstructing a clearer historical past for precolonial South Africa, and researching the anti-apartheid movement(s) of East and West Germany in the 1970s. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his partner Emily. His recent book, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries, won the American Historical Association’s 2023 Klein Prize for best work on Africa in English for 2022.