Fellows
© Jonny Steinberg
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As an Open Society Fellow, Jonny Steinberg wrote Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City (Jonathan Cape, 2011) about a Liberian diaspora community in a Staten Island housing project and the memories of civil war they carried with them to New York. The book narrates a history of the war as seen through the eyes of those fighting out its aftermath in a foreign country.
Steinberg currently works as a senior researcher at the Institute for the Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town, and is writing a book on the role of fear in shaping South African statecraft, past and present. His previous books look at everyday life in the wake of South Africa’s transition to democracy. Two of them, Midlands (Jonathan Ball, 2002), about the murder of a white farmer, and The Number (Jonathan Ball, 2004), about crime and punishment in Cape Town’s ghettos, won South Africa’s premier nonfiction literary award, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize.
Steinberg has written extensively on South Africa’s criminal justice system for the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg. He has a doctorate in political theory from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
