Neil Roos

Neil Roos is a South African social historian and professor of history at the University of Fort Hare, where he is also dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Additionally, he is co-implementer of the South African Department of Higher Education and Training’s national collaborative Future Professors Programme. He took his doctoral degree at the University of Bophuthatswana, one of the so-called "homeland" universities on South Africa’s rural periphery.

His research is animated by a focus on histories of everyday life in societies marked by great inequality. Unlike most social historians of South Africa, he is interested not so much in those who defied segregation and apartheid but rather in the history of beneficiaries and perpetrators. Over many years he has written about the complex anatomy of white everyday life in modern South Africa, asking questions about accommodation, choice and docility, as well as racism, racial identity and racial violence. These are uncomfortable questions about unfashionable subjects, and they feature in his most recent book, Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society: social histories of accommodation.