Ruramisai Charumbira

Associate Professor

PhD, Yale University, 2006

Email: rcharumb@uwo.ca 
Telephone: 519-661-2111 ext. 86521
Office: Lawson Hall 1220
Office Hours: By appointment: via zoom

Supervision

Master’s and Doctoral Supervision Privileges

Teaching: Fall/Winter 2026-27

Invocation and Welcome

To the Sun, in whose tight embrace we and other planets travel the Cosmos free of charge, we are grateful. To the Earth, the ground of our being, we are grateful. To our personal and collective ancestors, we are grateful, and we shall right the wrongs.

Mauya! Sam’kele! Welcome to this space. 

As a historian, a poet, and a memory practitioner, my work is rooted in the belief that historical study is not a passive excavation of the dead, but an active, living commitment to the present and the future. I invite you to explore my research, my teaching, and my creative lifeworlds. Whether you are a current or prospective student, a prospective collaborator, or a curious traveler, I welcome you in the spirit of Ubuntu/Hunhu—the recognition that our humanity is inextricably bound up in one another.

Research and Specialization

My intellectual journey is part factual declaration and part ongoing manifesto. I work at the intersections of African feminist theory, critical memory studies, indigenous ways of knowing, ecological humanities, and decolonial technologies.

My historical scholarship—including my first book, Imagining a Nation: History and Memory in Making Zimbabwe (University of Virginia Press, 2015), and my forthcoming monograph, Legacies of British Colonialism in Southern Africa: The Hole at the Heart of Ubuntu (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026)—interrogates the deep wounds of empire and the resilient architectures of indigenous memory in Southern Africa.

Entering the Arena: Algorithmic Sovereignty

In the twenty-first century, decolonial work must move past defensive critiques into active, generative reclamation. While my earlier work explored the structural ruptures of imperialisms, settler colonialisms, and nationalisms, my current projects are driven by an aspiration for transformative futures, particularly bridging global digital divides. In this, I hold a both-and posture toward contemporary technological shifts. The Rest of Us cannot afford absolute digital refusal or a retreat to small-scale tools while global monopolies capture and colonize the cognitive infrastructure of human history. Rejecting artificial intelligence outright risks creating a digital “bantustanization”—enforcing an artificial scarcity on the Global South while global systems flatten the wealth of non-Western knowledge. My stance is that Africa must not, as in previous centuries, merely provide the human labor and natural resources to make the metropole super-rich while waiting for new "AI missionaries" to translate our ways of knowing. Instead, my research and mentorship pivot toward Algorithmic Sovereignty. We must enter the computational arena as co-architects. My current collaborations investigate how Southern African languages (like chiShona and isiNdebele), oral storytelling structures, and the relational Shona concept of hukama (cosmic and ancestral interconnectedness) can be translated into conceptual and mathematical frameworks to de-bias, retrain, and govern large language models from the ground up.

Graduate and Postdoctoral Supervision

I hold Master’s and Doctoral Supervision Privileges and am actively looking to welcome graduate students (MA and PhD) and postdoctoral fellows who wish to co-create a relational intellectual community.

I am particularly seeking students whose projects are guided by an ethic of reciprocity and community-governed research—those who believe in actively giving back to the communities whose histories, languages, and lifeworlds they are studying. If you are interested in moving past extractive academic methodologies, my door is wide open to you.

I welcome supervision inquiries in the following areas:

• Indigenous (African) ways of knowing the past and decolonial historiographies.
• Ecological memory, animism, and relational environmental history—exploring how land, water, and ecosystems carry ancestral memories.
• Epistemological sovereignty in the Global South, including decolonial AI, ethical digital archiving, and community-governed datasets.
• Transnational feminist genealogies and diaspora public pedagogies.

 Solidarity, Not Just Allyship

Under my mentorship, we practice the hukama ethic, replacing traditional academic hierarchies with models of mutual responsibility and reciprocal learning. I do not look for "allies" in the traditional, passive sense. I look for deep collaboration on the basis of solidarity—conspirators who are willing to work side-by-side, co-publish, engage in collaborative writing circles, and establish strict, survivor-centered protocols that protect community data sovereignty.

Service and Professional Leadership

For me, institutional and professional service is an extension of decolonial practice. I am deeply committed to structural change within the global academy:

• Memory Studies Association (MSA): I serve on the MSA Executive Committee and as the Team Lead for the Transformative Inclusivity Initiative (MSA-TII). My work here focuses on decolonizing international memory studies, supporting marginalized scholars, and building equitable, global mentoring networks.
• Editorial Leadership: I am a Co-Editor of Safundi and serve on the Advisory Board of Bloomsbury: Critical Memory Studies and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History.
• THOR (Taking the Humanities on the Road): As the founder of THOR, I champion public humanities initiatives that take scholarly knowledge out of the ivory tower and into community spaces through public panels, creative performances, and cross-cultural dialogue.

Selected Publications

Books

Charumbira, R. (forthcoming 2026).  Legacies of British Colonialism in Southern Africa: The Hole at the Heart of Ubuntu. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Charumbira, R. (2015). Imagining a Nation: History and Memory in Making Zimbabwe. (Series: Reconsiderations in Southern African History). Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Finalist, Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians Book Prize.

Refereed Articles & Book Chapters 

Charumbira, R. (forthcoming Summer 2026). "Ecologies of Memory and Ecological Memories in Southern African Praise Poetry." Safundi.

Charumbira, R., Martin, J., McCarthy, M., and Wegner, J. (forthcoming October 2026). "Decolonizing Memory Studies, Reclaiming the Study of Memory: An Introduction." Special Issue, Memory Studies.

Charumbira, R. & Turkel, W. J. (2024). "A Minimal Computing Approach to Southern African Language Resources." Journal of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa, 5(1).

Charumbira, R. (2022). "Memory Activism and the Global Production of Knowledge." In Y. Gutman and J. Wüstenberg (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (73). London: Routledge.

Charumbira, R. (2022). "The Historian as Memory Practitioner." In C. Mark-Thiesen, M. Mihatsch, M. Sikes (Eds.), Commemoration and the Politics of Historical Memory in Africa. De Gruyter Oldenbourg.

Creative Works

I believe that rigorous academic writing must coexist with creative expression. My creative production includes:

Poetry Blog: The Animist (2020–present)

Selected Creative Publications:

• A Marriage in a Vase (Plants and Poetry Journal, 2020)
• .. This is Your Body Calling!!! (Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal, 1998)
• The Eye of the Storm (Short Story, Trans/forms: Insurgent Voices in Education, 2001)