Keith Breckenridge

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Keith Breckenridge is a South African professor of history at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is a specialist in the cultural and economic history of South Africa, particularly the gold mining industry, and the development of information systems such as birth, marriage and death registration and identity verification systems.

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Early life

Breckenridge was born in Johannesburg in 1965 and attended Hilton College. He is a graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand and Johns Hopkins University and completed his PhD at Northwestern University in 1995. [1]

Career

Breckenridge is professor of history at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is a specialist in the cultural and economic history of South Africa, particularly the gold mining industry, and the development of information systems such as birth, marriage and death registration and identity verification systems.

With Simon Szreter he edited Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History which was published by Oxford University Press and The British Academy in 2012 as part of the proceedings of the British Academy based on a workshop held in Cambridge in 2010. [2] [3]

In 2014, he published Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present, (Cambridge University Press, 2014) which was the inaugural winner of the Humanities Book Award of the Academy of Science of South Africa.

Selected publications

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References

  1. "Keith Breckenridge - Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research". Wiser.wits.ac.za. Retrieved 30 July 2018.
  2. Caplan, J. (28 August 2014). "Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History, ed. Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter". The English Historical Review. 129 (540): 1254–1256. doi:10.1093/ehr/ceu202 . Retrieved 30 July 2018.
  3. "A registration crisis? History and policy" (PDF). Britac.ac.uk. Retrieved 30 July 2018.
  4. Seekings, Jeremy (22 July 2016). "Biometric State: the global politics of identification and surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the present by Keith Breckenridge (review)". Africa: Journal of the International African Institute. 86 (3): 600–602. doi:10.1017/S0001972016000425. S2CID   152036598 . Retrieved 30 July 2018 via Project MUSE.
  5. Thornberry, Elizabeth (3 July 2015). "Keith Breckenridge.Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present". International Feminist Journal of Politics. 17 (3): 517–519. doi:10.1080/14616742.2015.1055142. S2CID   146327801.
  6. Levenson, Zachary (1 October 2016). "Book review: Biometric State: The global politics of identification and surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the present, Book review: Biometric State: The global politics of identification and surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the present". Journal of Asian and African Studies. 51 (5): 636–638. doi:10.1177/0021909615616475. S2CID   152226017.