Staff profile

Before joining the History Department at Durham in 2014, I was educated at Durham Johnston Comprehensive School, the University of Sheffield and SOAS in London.

My research focuses upon South Africa in the final decades of the Apartheid State, the transition to democratic government in the 1990s, and follows the politics of institutional change into the Twenty-First Century.

I have explored the involvement of young people within anti-apartheid politics, and in particular the experiences of young women as activists within the school-based youth movements of the 1970s and 1980s. My forthcoming monograph, Voice, Silence and Gender in South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Struggle: The Shadow of a Young Woman, asks what we know of this past, and how we know it. I trace the life and death of one young woman, Masabata Loate, through written and oral archives of the struggle to uncover how voices and silences are made and unmade. This is a ‘shadow biography’ that acknowledges the limits to our knowledge and scrutinises those limits for what they can tell us, about how historical narratives are formed as part of the unfolding of violent political conflict.

Elsewhere I have written about young women in Drum magazine, newspaper reportage of June 16 commemorations, the gendered transformations of South Africa’s Parliament, and the establishment of the Constitutional Court after 1994.

• Gender History
• History of Parliaments
• Modern South African History
• Political Cultures
• Public History

Chapter in book

• Johnson, R. E., & Rai, S. (2016). Narrating the Nation: Murals and Tapestry in the Indian and South African Parliaments. In A. Virmani (Ed.), Political Aesthetics: Culture, Critique and the Everyday. Routledge
• Johnson, R., Armitage, F., & Spary, C. (2014). 'The Speakership and Parliamentary Feminisation: The Emergence and Impact of First Female Speakers'; 'Disrupting Deliberation: Comparing Repertoires of Parliamentary Representation'; and ‘Pageantry as Politics: The State Opening of Parliaments’. In R. Johnson, & S. Rai (Eds.), Democracy in Practice. Palgrave Macmillan

Edited book

• Johnson, R. E., & Rai, S. (Eds.). (2014). Democracy in Practice: Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliaments. Palgrave Macmillan

Journal Article

• Johnson, R. E. (2016). ‘The day that fell off the calendar’: 16 June, South African newspapers, and the making of a national holiday, 1977–1996. Journal of Southern African Studies, 42(6), 1143-1160. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2016.1256145
• Johnson, R. E. (2014). Women as a Sign of the New? Appointments to South Africa's Constitutional Court since 1994. Politics & Gender, 10(4), 595-621. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1743923x14000439
• Johnson, R., & McLeod, L. (2014). Gendering Processes of Institutional Design: Activists at the Negotiating Table: Sheila Meintjes, Alice Brown and Valerie Oosterveld in Conversation with Laura McLeod and Rachel Johnson. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 16(2), 354-369. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2014.918777
• Johnson, R. E. (2014). Haunted by the Somatic Norm: South African Parliamentary Debates on Abortion in 1975 and 1996. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 39(2), 485-508. https://doi.org/10.1086/673126
• Johnson, R. E. (2013). Disrupting the South African parliament: performing opposition 1994–2010. Democratization, 20(3), 478-500. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2013.786546
• Johnson, R. E., Armitage, F., Spary, C., & Malley, R. (2012). A Conversation: Researching Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliaments. Feminist Theory, 13(3), 325-336. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700112456007
• Johnson, R. E. (2009). ‘The Girl About Town’: Discussions of Modernity and Female Youth in Drum Magazine, 1951–1970. Social Dynamics, 35(1), 36-50. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533950802666899