Robert Morrell

Robert Morrell is a South African academic who pioneered the study of men and masculinities in South Africa. Morrell was born in Cape Town, lived in Swaziland, and studied in Grahamstown (Rhodes University) and Johannesburg (Wits University). He has worked at many South African universities including Transkei (now Walter Sisulu University), Durban-Westville and Natal (now University of KwaZulu-Natal) and the University of Cape Town (UCT). Morrell’s early career was as an historian of agrarian history in South Africa but in the early 1990s he switched his focus to gender and specifically to the study of masculinities. He was based in an Education Faculty and much of his work focussed on gender inequality and gender-based violence in schools. He also conducted research on questions of parenting and co-edited, with Deevia Bhana and Tamara Shefer, Books and Babies: Pregnancy and Parenthood in South African Schools (2012). From 2010-2021 Morrell worked in research development and academic staff support at UCT. He established a mid-career support programme, the Next Generation Professoriate (NGP), a novel intervention to support particularly black and female academics to achieve academic promotion. Having retired at the end of 2021, he now occupies the position of Senior Research Scholar in the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED) at UCT.