Jonny Steinberg
Bio
Jonny Steinberg is currently working on a biography of the late nineteenth-century British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes. His last book, Winnie and Nelson: A Portrait of a Marriage, which was published in 2023, takes in a century of South African history through the prism of the marriage of Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography and has been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize in the UK.
Steinberg is the author of seven previous books, most of them about everyday life in South Africa in the period stretching from late apartheid to the present. He was an inaugural winner of Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes and was twice winner of South Africa’s premier nonfiction prize, the Sunday Times Nonfiction Award.
Steinberg is currently teaching two seminars at Yale, ‘Bureaucracy in Africa’ and ‘Archival Methods in the Social Sciences. Until 2020, he was Professor of African Studies at Oxford University and Visiting Professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (Wiser) at Wits University in Johannesburg.
Contact
Rosenkranz Hall
115 Prospect Street, Room 437
203-432-1425
jonny.steinberg@yale.edu
jonnysteinberg@gmail.com
Education
- Ph.D.: Oxford University, 1999
- M.A.: Wits University, 1995
- B.A.: Wits University, 1992
Videos
- 2019-01-25 - Jonny Steinberg talks about Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s marriage
- 2018-2-04 - Symposium on Jonny Steinberg’s “The Number”
- 2011-11-07 - TEDxStellenbosch - Jonny Steinberg - Lessons in Owning a City
Courses Taught at Yale
Awards
- 2024 Sunday Times Literary Award for his dual biography Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage (Jonathan Ball, 2023)
C.V.