Chris Saunders is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Currently he is a Research Associate at the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town. He was a one-time Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He began using archives in the late 1960s when researching his doctoral dissertation for Oxford on the Transkei in the late 19th century. This was before there were photocopiers in any of the archives he visited, let alone digital cameras. In the 1970s, after beginning to teach at UCT, he turned his attention to Africans in Cape Town, then to questions of historiography, which required relatively little archival research but began to lead him to a broader understanding of the sources of historical enquiry. His scholarly interests lie in the 20th century history of Southern Africa. More recently, He have been mainly working on the transition from apartheid to democracy in Namibia and South Africa, and was for many years involved in two digital projects (DISA and Aluka) related to that work. He is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf).
