BIO

Dr. Panashe Chigumadzi is an award-winning writer, historian and Assistant Professor at Brandeis University. As Rapporteur for the African Union’s Committee of Experts on Reparations (AUCER) for Racialized Chattel Enslavement, Colonialism and Apartheid, she conceptualized and drafted the AU Framework for Reparations, A Crime Does Not Rot, 1441–Present, which provided the structural rationale for the landmark March 2026 UN General Assembly resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement “the gravest crime against humanity.”

Chigumadzi received her PhD from Harvard University and her Master’s from the University of the Witwatersrand. Her forthcoming academic book, Conquer and Incorporate: Ubuntu as an Ethics of War and Conquest under the Nine Wars of Dispossession, 1779–1878, examines 19th-century discourses of Ubuntu through her recovery of over 500 newspaper texts by Black intellectuals in isiXhosa, isiZulu, seTswana, and seSotho.

Her award-winning publications include the novel Sweet Medicine (winner of the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award), the memoir These Bones Will Rise Again (shortlisted for the 2019 Alan Paton Prize), and the 2020 Gordon Parks Foundation Prize-winning essay “What don’t you see when you look at me?” A former New York Times columnist, she was the founding editor of Vanguard Magazine, a platform for Black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa. 

She has held fellowships including Harvard’s Hutchins Center Fellowships and the University of Iowa’s International Writers Program, and has delivered addresses such as the 2024 Princeton Africa Lecture, the 2023 ZAM Nelson Mandela Lecture in Amsterdam, and the 2016 Ruth First Memorial Lecture in Johannesburg. Her first play, Song Unburied, has been performed in over five countries and will debut at the 2026 Edinburgh International Festival.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Photo: Tarryn Hatchet