Professor Garth Stevens

DVC: PEOPLE DEVELOPMENT AND CULTURE

Prof. Garth Stevens previously held the positions of Dean, Deputy Dean, Co-Assistant Dean (Graduate Studies), and Assistant Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Humanities. He currently serves as the Deputy Vice-Chancellor: People Development and Culture. Prior to joining Wits in 2006, he lectured at the University of the Western Cape in the Psychology Department at the beginning of his career, conducted research at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences, and worked as a researcher on the MRC-UNISA co-directed Crime, Violence and Injury Lead Programme. 

A clinical psychologist by training and a Professor of Psychology, his research interests include foci on race, racism and related social asymmetries; critical violence studies; applied psychoanalytic theorising of contemporary socio-political issues; and historical/collective trauma and memory. He has published widely in these areas, both nationally and internationally, including co-editorships of A ‘race’ against time: Psychology and challenges to deracialisation in South Africa (UNISA Press, 2006); Race, memory and the apartheid archive: Towards a transformative psychosocial praxis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Decoloniality and epistemic justice in contemporary community psychology (Springer, 2021). He was the co-lead researcher on the Apartheid Archive Project, which was an international research initiative that aimed to examine the nature of the experiences of racism of South Africans under the old apartheid order and their continuing effects on individual and group functioning in contemporary South Africa. He was also the co-lead researcher on the Violent States, States of Violence Project, which aimed to re-engage a theorisation of violence in the contemporary world. He is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), held a B-rating from the National Research Foundation in his last review period, and is both a Lifetime Achievement Fellow and Past-President of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA).