Professor Pamela Maseko is the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Nelson Mandela University in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. The Humanities Faculty at Nelson Mandela University includes disciplines in the Arts and Social Sciences.
She has worked for over three decades at various higher education institutions in South Africa, and as a research fellow both locally and abroad. She has extensive experience in South Africa’s higher education sector, having served as a founding board member of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS); council member of the Council for Higher Education (CHE); and as a member of the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC). She also served on the Ministerial Oversight Committee on Transformation in South African Public Universities.
Maseko has held tenures at the University of Cape Town, Rhodes University, University of the Western Cape, and at North-West University as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. She is also the current President of the South African Humanities Deans’ Association (SAHUDA) and holds fellowships at universities both locally and internationally.
As a recipient of numerous grants and awards, she has been instrumental in sourcing funding from various national and international funders to support research in universities where she has held tenure.
Maseko received her Bachelor's and Honours degrees from the University of the Western Cape and her Master’s, PhD, and a PG Dip HE from Rhodes University. She is a social scientist specializing in historical sociolinguistics with research interests in language policy and planning, language and learning in higher education, and historiography of (South) African literature.