Professor Jocelyn Alexander is the Professor of Commonwealth Studies and Head of Oxford Department of International Development (ODID). Her research interests lie in the social and political history of southern Africa, particularly liberation struggles and their legacies, law and punishment, violence and memory, and rural politics and land reform. She is currently working on a Leverhulme-funded collaborative research project titled ‘Global Soldiers in the Cold War: Making southern Africa’s liberation armies’, and writing a history of political imprisonment in Zimbabwe.

She has taught at Sussex and Bristol Universities and has been a Research Associate at the University of Zimbabwe. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Southern African Studies and the publications committee of the International Africa Institute.

She is co-author with JoAnn McGregor and Terence Ranger of Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the 'Dark Forests' of Matabeleland (James Currey, 2000), and author of The Unsettled Land: The Politics of Land and State-making in Zimbabwe, 1893-2003 (James Currey, 2006).