Mpho Calachan Molefe

Mpho is a PhD candidate in the Stanford Department of English with a minor in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE). She is a 2025-2026 Susan Ford Dorsey Africa Innovation Fellow at the Center for African Studies. Mpho fosters intellectual community within African Studies at Stanford through her work as a co-coordinator for the 2025-2026 Interdisciplinary Humanities Africanist Writing Group, an academic group supported by the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education’s Student Projects for Intellectual Enhancement (SPICE) grant. She has supported equitable, inclusive, and research-based teaching throughout her own practices as a graduate instructor in the English Department and in her work as a Graduate Teaching Consultant (2023-present) and Graduate Teaching Consultant Coordinator (2024-2026) with the Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). Before coming to Stanford, Mpho earned a BA in English at Yale University. 

Mpho’s dissertation seeks to address the problem of belonging in post-apartheid South Africa by exploring a set of post-apartheid (1998-2018) novels which represent the country’s settler colonial past in the nineteenth century. Her project begins from the premise that nationalist narratives prioritizing citizenship as the single metric for belonging minimize the ways in which the effects of South Africa’s settler colonial past persist in the form of sharp economic disparities and white dominance in land ownership. She argues that select novels offer an alternative way of thinking about belonging that she terms “provisional belonging.” Rather than considering belonging in terms of arrival or conferred status, the temporal sense of “provisional” as “temporary” or “in place of a better alternative” invites the conceptualization of belonging in terms of process and navigation. Mpho’s project proposes that this shift in conceptualization enables connections with land and community to be held ever in open relation to different forms of unbelonging. As she defines provisional belonging through her literary analysis, Mpho draws on theories of settler colonialism, nationalism, temporality, space, and historical narrative.