Rosette Sifa Vuninga was formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow with the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (2023–2024) and a University Research Committee Fellow (2025) in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. She is a Salzburg Global Fellow in the Rethinking Youth Safety and Justice Systems program (2022–present), a 2024 Individual Research Fellow of the Social Science Research Council’s African Peacebuilding Network (APN), a 2017 recipient of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation’s African Fellowship, a 2019–2022 Andrew Mellon Doctoral Fellow, the 2020 SSRC African Peacebuilding Network Doctoral Fellow, and a 2016 APN Collaborative Research Group Grant awardee.
She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of the Western Cape. Her book project, based on her doctoral dissertation, examines how ethnic and regional identities are experienced and negotiated among Congolese migrants in Cape Town. Her broader research focuses on migration, particularly the transborder politics of identity and belonging, homeland politics and activism, transnationalism, and the translocality of conflicts, with a focus on Congolese communities in South Africa. She also studies youth networks of violence, economies of insecurity, and representations of identity and national belonging through popular culture in the postcolonial era. Her publications include peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, reviews, and working papers.
As the 2025 Fatema Mernissi Postdoctoral Fellow in Social and Cultural Studies at The Africa Institute, she will work on her monograph based on her Ph.D. research and publish peer-reviewed articles from her ongoing research on Congolese homeland politics and activism in South Africa.
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