Biography
Tara Weinberg is a postdoctoral research fellow with the New Archival Visions project at the CHR. Their research focuses on histories of property, land, law, credit, debt and political imagination. Tara also works on ongoing struggles over property law, land and housing justice in South Africa.
Tara obtained their PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 2023. Tara’s PhD thesis, “Property of the People: Imaginaries of Property Ownership in South Africa, 1900-1994,” examined how black land buyers, farmers and intellectuals debated and imagined kinds of property that offered alternatives to the state’s narrow categorizations of property law. Previously they worked as a researcher on land reform at the Land and Accountability Research Centre at the University of Cape Town.
Tara’s work at CHR and PLAAS is focused on building an archive related to research on property and land reform.
Research interest
Legal history and anthropology; land reform; agrarian studies; political economy; archives and memory.
Recent publications
Tara Weinberg, “A History of Communal Property Associations in South Africa”, in William Beinart, Gavin Capps and Rosalie Kingwill (Ed.s), Land, Law and Chiefs in Rural South Africa: Contested Histories and Current Struggles (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, May 2021)
Tara Weinberg, “Segregated Landscapes in South Africa, 1800–1994”, in Daniel Magaziner (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of South African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, April 2021)
Tara Weinberg, ‘Forging Property from Struggle in South Africa’, Reverb Effect (Podcast), Season 4, Episode 2, Department of History, University of Michigan (May 2023)