Menu Close

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo

Research Associate, Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, University of the Witwatersrand

Dr. Melissa Tandiwe Myambo is a research associate at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. Links to her other writings can be found on her website www.homosumhumani.com or you can read her politics newsletter at https://bourgeoismarxist.substack.com/.

She was a 2017 Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study writing fellow. In 2016, she was the recipient of a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award to conduct research in India, where she was affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. When the weather is warm, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Melissa has a PhD in comparative literature from New York University (NYU) and in addition to teaching comp lit courses, she has also lectured in sociology, area, global, migration and international development studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Cape Town and NYU. Most vitally, she is a group fitness instructor whose favourite classes to teach are dance, bootcamp and boxing.

Her current research project focuses on "frontier migration", a concept she formulated to analyse the movement of people, capital, technology and ideas from a "developed" economy to a "developing" economy.

"Highly skilled" migrants are moving from more “developed” countries such as the US to the “developing” economies of China, India, and South Africa. Melissa asks why these frontier migrants are heading to the “global south” and examines the microspaces or "cultural time zones" – another concept she formulated – in which they work, live and socialise in their new homes.

Within contemporary frontier migration, she also explores frontier heritage migration – the African and Asian diasporas raised in Euro-America who are now “returning” to their globalising homelands.

Since colonial times, frontier migrants have been fundamental to what we now experience as cultural-economic globalisation. Today’s multi-ethnic, middle-class frontier migrants are responding to and creating the "frontier capitalism" that is currently transforming the global economy.

Her research has also been enabled by two generous postdoctoral fellowships. She was a Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town and then a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cultures in Transnational Perspective programme and visiting assistant professor at the University of California in Los Angeles in the Dept of Comparative Literature and the International Development Studies programme.

Experience

  • –present
    Fublright-Nehru Scholar, Research Associate, Centre for Indian Studies, Wits University, University of California, Los Angeles