Professor Jonathan Jansen FBA
- Fellow type
- International Fellow
- Year elected
- 2025
- Honours
- FBA
- Sections
- Education
- Website
- https://jonathanjansen.org/
Summary
Jonathan Jansen is Distinguished Professor of Education at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
A native of Cape Town, he achieved his advanced degrees from Cornell University (MS) and Stanford University (PhD) where he developed a life-long interest in the politics and poetics of knowledge as expressed through the institutional curriculum and university disciplines.
He has straddled many leadership roles in South Africa from high school science teacher and department head to academic dean and university vice-chancellor.
For some time, he served as President of both the Academy of Science of South Africa and the South African Institute for Race Relations.
He has been elected Fellow of several world academies including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the International Academy of Education.
Throughout his career, his research and development commitments spanned schools and universities where he worked as a social scientist trying to understand the problem of change and as reformer trying to change complex problems.
His intellectual interests nevertheless remain broad, with recent books covering topics such as the mechanisms of discovery of scientific knowledge, academic xenophobia, corruption in universities, and the decolonization of knowledge.