Christa Kuljian

Christa Kuljian is a Johannesburg-based writer who has focused on issues of social justice. She is the author of three books of narrative nonfiction – Sanctuary (Jacana 2013) is about poverty, migration, and the refugee crisis at Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg. Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins (Jacana 2016) was short listed for the Alan Paton Prize and the NIHSS prize for nonfiction. And Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science (University of Massachusetts Press 2024) is about a network of feminist scientists in the Boston area in the US in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Christa grew up in the Boston area, and has lived in Johannesburg for over thirty years. From 1992-2003, Christa was the Director of the C. S. Mott Foundation’s South Africa office, which supported legal rights and paralegal organisations, women’s organisations, and the NGO sector. Currently, Christa is a Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at Wits University. She was a Ruth First Fellow in 2010 and gave the Steve Biko Lecture on Bioethics in 2023. She has published in many publications including Botsotso, City Press, New Contrast, Social Dynamics, African Studies, the South African Journal of Science, The Times, the Mail and Guardian, Daily Maverick, the Johannesburg Review of Books and The Conversation Africa. In addition to her undergraduate degree in the History of Science from Harvard (1984), she holds a Masters in Public Affairs from Princeton (1989) and an MA in Writing from the University of the Witwatersrand (2007).