In my personal career development I became a regional history expert.mAfter my postgraduate work, my research in regional history gradually matured towards four central foci. Initially, I focused on (i) Gold mining as the region’s economic driver and (ii) Local economic developments and related environmental distortions. Once I had a more comprehensive multidisciplinary understanding of the FWR and regional histories as field, I (iii) advanced the methodological paradigm for doing regional and micro (local) histories, as well as the historiography of regional history in South Africa (SA).

Johanita Kirsten, senior lecturer in Afrikaans Linguistics at the Vanderbijlpark Campus of the North-West University, is interested in recent and ongoing changes in Afrikaans language use. She completed her MA and PhD in Afrikaans and Dutch (Historical Linguistics) at the NWU under supervision of prof. Bertus van Rooy, and received the ABSA Bronze Medal for her MA dissertation.

I am a lecturer and researcher working in the field of linguistics, and a member of the UPSET research focus area, at the Vanderbijlpark Campus of the North-West University.