Tara Weinberg

New Archival Visions Fellow, Postdoctoral

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 is also interested in 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. Previously they worked as a researcher on land reform at the Land and Accountability Research Centre at the University of Cape Town. They are the author of “A History of Communal Property Associations in South Africa,” published in Land, Law and Chiefs in Rural South Africa: Contested Histories and Current Struggles (2021) and the podcast, “Forging Property from Struggle” for Reverb Effect (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.

Tara’s work at CHR is focused on bringing to life materials on forced removals, land reform, gender and land, art and landscape, and social movements around land claims and land justice in the Mayibuye archive.