Sarah Godsell
Senior Lecturer of History Education, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Fellow 2026–27
- Current Project
- Historical Feeling: Affective Knowledge as Historical Knowledge
- Project Discipline
- Education Studies
- Fellowship Title
- Iso Lomso Fellowship
About Fellow
Sarah Godsell is a poet, a historian, and an educator. She is currently a senior lecturer in history education at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She completed her PhD in South African history in 2015. In 2016, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the CEPR at the University of Johannesburg, which is where she transitioned into history education. Here, she began researching the teaching of history in higher education and in schools, with a particular focus on training history teachers. In 2017, she was appointed at the Wits School of Education.
Godsell’s research draws on decoloniality and the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), and she has published on history education in South African and international journals. In 2025, she was selected as a 2025–27 Iso Lomso Fellow by STIAS (Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study) to work on the project “Historical Feeling: Decolonising History Education” which is the project that brings her to the National Humanities Center. She also has two published poetry collections, Seaweed Sky (2016) and Liquid Bones (2018).
Selected Publications
- Godsell, Sarah. “Decolonial Impulses for Assessment: Re-imagining an Exam as a Podcast.” Scholarship of Teaching and Learning for the South 9, no. 2 (2025): 43–73.
- Godsell, Sarah, and Pfano Maluleka. “Student Voice in History Teacher Education: A Means to Build Pedagogies Around Marginalised Historical Narratives.” Historical Thinking Culture and Education 2, no. 1 (2025).
- Godsell, Sarah, and Pfano Maluleka. “Towards a Decolonised Framing and Understanding of the Historical Thinking Project in a Global South Space.” Historical Encounters 12, no. 1 (2025): 1–13.
- Godsell, Sarah, and Zakhele Mathebula. “Poetry as a Site of History Education and Exploration: Learning History from and with Poetry.” History Education Research Journal 22, no. 1 (2025): 23.
- Godsell, Sarah, and Pfano Maluleka. “The Continued Absence of the LGBTIQA+ Community in School History Textbooks in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Yesterday and Today, no. 31 (2024).