Choose a Supervisor
Dr Devon Bailey
Supervision Areas: Identity Politics, African Philosophy (Personhood, Identity, and the Self), Self-knowledge and Identity, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics, Hip Hop Theory
Dr Bailey is a lecturer at the UJ Department of Philosophy. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from UJ and the NIHSS Doctoral Scholarship award. She specialises in tutor mentorship and teaching philosophy to non-philosophy students.
Dr Bailey’s research is focused on the Philosophy of art and aesthetics, and most especially the philosophy of dance. Her research interests include African philosophy, specifically personhood, identity, and the self, as well as feminist theory and phenomenology. She is particularly interested in identity and self-knowledge in the context of identity politics and somaesthetics, and approaches her writings on aesthetics from a predominantly African perspective.
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Prof. Catherine Botha
Supervision topics: Aesthetics; philosophy of art; nineteenth and twentieth century continental philosophy, esp, the work of Heidegger and Nietzsche; feminism; philosophy of mind; philosophy of technology, esp the ethics and aesthetics of AI; animal ethics; bioethics.
Full professor in Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, Prof Botha joined UJ Philosophy in 2009. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
Her research is focused mainly on issues in ethics and aesthetics, with a special focus on the philosophy of dance. Her interest is generated as a result of her strong background in the phenomenological tradition and its precursors in the continental tradition (most especially the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger). She also writes and teaches on themes in aesthetics and ethics in the philosophy of technology, with a strong focus on the ethics and aesthetics of artificial intelligence.
Prof Botha is currently the co-secretary of the South African Centre for Phenomenology, and also a registered ballet teacher of the Royal Academy of Dance. Her interest and expertise in teaching in higher education is also significant. She was the winner of the UJ Vice Chancellor’s Award for Best Young Teacher in 2014, and winner of the UJ Vice Chancellor’s Distinguished Award for Best Teacher in 2020.
Dr. Chad Harris
Supervision areas: Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Social Science, African Philosophy, Decolonisation
Dr Harris is a senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the former director of the department’s African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (ACEPS) and works under the ACEPS project “Rationality and Power”. His other research interest is in the methodology of social science, especially the problem of external validity.
Dr Dimpho Maponya
Supervision areas: Feminism, Gender and Sexuality, African Philosophy, Decolonial Theory and Ethics.
Dr Takane Maponya is a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ) Philosophy Department. She officially joined the Philosophy Department at UJ in 2019 as an assistant lecturer. Dr Takane Maponya recently completed her PhD at UJ titled: How Should We Decolonise? A Pragmatist African Feminist Standpoint Proposal. Her research lies at the intersection of feminism (with a specific focus on African feminism) and decolonial theory. Dr Takane Maponya has received a few awards, including the South African Women in Science Masters’ fellowship in 2017 from the Department of Science and Technology and, in 2020, the Most Promising Young Teacher Award from the Faculty of Humanities at UJ.
Contact: Dr Dimpho Takane
Prof. Veli Mitova
Supervision areas: Veli welcomes excellent Honours, MA and PhD students who would like to work in any area of epistemology, social epistemology, and feminist epistemology, especially on epistemic injustice, the decolonisation of knowledge, and the epistemology of AI.
Veli is Professor in Philosophy and Director of the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, at the University of Johannesburg. Veli works at the intersection of epistemology, ethics, and social epistemology. At the moment, her focus is on epistemic injustice, decolonising knowledge, and the ways in which phenomena such as white ignorance should make us rethink central normative-epistemology concepts like epistemic reasons, risk, blame, and responsibility. She is the author of Believable Evidence (CUP 2017), and the editor of Epistemic Decolonisation (2020) and of The Factive Turn in Epistemology (CUP 2018). Before joining the University of Johannesburg in 2015, Veli taught and researched at Universität Wien, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, Rhodes University (her alma mater), and Cambridge (where she obtained her PhD).
Dr. Asheel Singh
Supervision areas: Meaning in life, applied ethics, bioethics (transhumanism/human enhancement), population ethics (anti-natalism), environmental ethics. AOC: African philosophy (esp. metaphysics), Eastern philosophical approaches (esp. Indian), theories of consciousness (e.g., cosmopsychism), philosophy of religion, Nietzsche.
Dr Singh is a senior lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg. Dr Singh’s research areas include meaning in life and applied ethics, with a specific focus on procreative ethics. His research interests also include Eastern philosophy, environmental ethics, philosophy of religion, African ethics and metaphysics, and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. He won the UJ Faculty of Humanities Best Postgraduate Teacher Award in 2021. Dr Singh is UJ Philosophy’s Postgraduate Coordinator (Teaching). True to stereotype, he would like to point out that he has been vegan since 2004.
Prof. Ben Smart
Supervision areas: Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Medicine, Philosophy of Epidemiology
Professor Smart is co-founder of The Centre for Philosophy of Epidemiology, Medicine and Public Health, and an Associate Professor in Philosophy of Medicine. Prior to joining the University of Johannesburg in 2015 he lectured at The University of Birmingham, having received his PhD from Nottingham University in 2012.
Prof Smart’s research focuses on the on the philosophy of medicine, philosophy of public health, and philosophy of epidemiology. He has published two monographs, entitled ‘Concepts and Causes in the Philosophy of Disease’, and (TUFTS Professor, Olaf Dammann) ‘Causation in Population Health Informatics and Data Science‘. He has numerous papers in highly ranked international philosophy journals, including Philosophical Studies and Analysis, as well as publications in both specialist medical journals and philosophy of medicine journals. He is a subject editor for the journal Philosophy of Medicine.
In addition to his work on philosophy of medicine/public health, Prof Smart has published on the metaphysics of science, the problem of induction, the nature of fundamental properties, decolonising education, and the philosophy of sport.
Prof. Rafael Winkler
Prof Winkler received his PhD from the University of Warwick in 2007. After completing a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Dundee, Scotland, in 2008, he held temporary teaching positions at various universities in the UK (Nottingham University, Nottingham Trent University, The Open University) until taking up a permanent post at UJ in July 2012.
In 2019, Prof Winkler was awarded a STIAS Fellowship from the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study and a Professorial Fellowship from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
Supervision topics: Contemporary Continental Philosophy, phenomenology, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, Žižek; early modern philosophy (Descartes, Locke, Hume) and Classical Greek thought (Plato, Aristotle) and Stoicism.
Dr. Tony Shabangu
Supervision areas: Tony is happy to offer supervision to Hons and MA (and exceptional PhD) students who would like to work in any area of moral philosophy, African ethics, ethics & jurisprudence, ethics in corrections and bioethics, with a huge focus on Ubuntu and decolonisation of knowledge.
Tony Shabangu is a Philosophy lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, where his main areas of research specialization are African Ethics, primarily Ubuntu. Prior to that he was a coordinator at the Postgraduate School’s Research Capacity Development Unit where his role was to facilitate the PG Diploma, Honours and Master’s Coursework students’ workshops, mini-courses, short learning programmes, events and collaboration.
Additionally, Tony has completed a Post Doctoral Research Fellowship with the Centre for Leadership Ethics based in Fort Hare where he worked on Punishment Ethics as a Post Doctoral Fellow. As a student, Tony joined the University of Johannesburg in 2008 and recently received his Ph.D. at the Department of Philosophy in 2022. Prior to graduating in 2022 Tony was the on-site Research Writing Consultant at UJ’s Research Capacity Development unit located at the Postgraduate School.
Tony has lectured 3rd Year Ethics (UKZN), Optometry for Ethics (fourth-year level), Social Work Ethics (Honours) and taught Ethics for Engineering, Ethics for Accounting and English for Law. Tony has presented work in various conferences, with the most recent being the Philosophy Society of Southern Africa conference in 2023 (at UJ). Other conferences include University of Durham (May 2019),21 Years of South African Democracy Conference (June 2019) and the 3MT (3 Minute Thesis 2019), which both took place at UJ.
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