About

Apartheid Heritages: A Spatial History of South Africa’s Township’s website is part of a larger analogue and digital book project currently under development by Dr. Angel David Nieves. This “book” is in the very early phases of discussion and development with a university press.
Dr. Nieves is Professor of Africana Studies, History, and Digital Humanities in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSSH) at Northeastern University and is an Affiliate Professor in the Department of English and in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. He is currently Director of the Graduate Program in Public History and Director of Public Humanities in CSSH. He was most recently Associate Professor of History at San Diego State University in San Diego, California, USA. (2017-2020). Nieves was an Associate Professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York., USA (2008-2017) and co-directed Hamilton’s Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi), a $1.75 million Mellon Foundation Grant funded project (http://www.dhinitiative.org).
Dr. Nieves’s scholarly and community-based activism examines the intersections between architecture, social justice, and human rights on the Internet, and critically engages with issues of race and the built environment in cities across the Global South. Coinciding with his work in digital humanities is Dr. Nieves’s research on the history of heritage conservation and urban regeneration efforts in South Africa, in particular the South African township called Soweto, where he has traveled annually since 2004. From 2006-2008 he worked to create the Soweto’76, A Living Digital Archive at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland as a Faculty Fellow from the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (SoAPP).
From 2008-2010 he continued working with MITH as a Networked Faculty Fellow as a faculty member at Hamilton College. Dr. Nieves has been working on a number of preservation efforts in Johannesburg’s “South Western Townships”—better known as Soweto—for over a decade. Located some 30 km from downtown Johannesburg, the township of Soweto has been a site of both historical contestation and numerous state-sponsored heritage projects. In South Africa, the legacy of apartheid has meant a constant engagement with cultural trauma and its impact on all aspects of social life, particularly for township residents beginning in the early twentieth-century.