Prof. Shula Marks, OBE, FBA, is a globally preeminent British Jewish historian and scholar of Southern Africa. An emeritus professor at University of London and former Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, she is a definitive authority on the socio-political history of apartheid, colonial resistance, and the intersections of race, class, and health. A Fellow of the British Academy, she was awarded an OBE in 1996 for her monumental contributions to historical scholarship and human rights education.
Born in Cape Town in 1938, Marks’s formative years were defined by the emergence of the formal apartheid state in South Africa—an experience that anchored her lifelong commitment to dismantling structural racism. After moving to London and earning her doctorate at SOAS, she transformed the University of London into a global hub for the study of South African resistance and the deconstruction of settler-colonial ideologies.
Her scholarly interventions, particularly her work on the socio-economic underpinnings of race and class in South Africa, provided the international anti-apartheid movement with the empirical ammunition required to challenge the regime’s legitimacy. She pioneered the study of how public health and administrative systems were weaponized to enforce segregation—a framework now widely used to analyze contemporary military occupations.
As a founding signatory of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), Marks leveraged her expertise as a historian of apartheid to validate the movement’s critique of Israeli state policy. Over the past few decades, she has co-signed numerous petitions on Palestinian peace, human rights, and self-determination.