HILARY LYND on DECOLONIZATION, Ethnonationalism, and the Soviet Union: A View from South Africa

Hilary Lynd is a historian of the former Soviet Union and South Africa. Broadly, Hilary studies regimes of difference--how they are made, inhabited, and transformed. In an article for Slavic Review, she and Thom Loyd explored evolving understandings of Blackness and Africanness through the lifespan of the Soviet Union. In Hilary's prize-winning article in the South African Historical Journal, she investigated a secret land deal that preserved key structures of the apartheid-era Zulu homeland into the post-apartheid era. Her current book project compares and connects the histories of ethnic homelands in the Soviet Union and South Africa, culminating in the simultaneous collapse of Soviet nationalities policy and apartheid in the early 1990s. Hilary completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and she is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Wits University in Johannesburg.