Charles van Onselen (birth 14 August 1944, Boksburg)^[1] is a researcher and historian based at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Education

Van Onselen holds a B.Sc. and U.E.D. from Rhodes University, a B.A. Hons. from the University of the Witwatersrand, a D.Phil. from Oxford University and a D.Lit.(Honoris Causa) from Rhodes.^[2]

Academic career

He is based at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.^[2][3]

Recognition and awards

He received the Alan Paton Award for The Seed is Mine in 1997.^[2]

Personal life

Charles was married to Belinda Bozzoli, and their three children including Gareth van Onselen.^[4]

Selected works

• The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894–1985 (1996), described as a "detailed and compelling history of the effect of South Africa's Land Laws on one man and his family"^[5]
• New Babylon New Nineveh: Everyday life on the Witwatersand 1886–1914, a social and economic history of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century Witwatersrand
• The Fox and the Flies (2007), a social, political, and economic history of the Trans-Atlantic underworld from about 1890 until 1918, the year Joseph Silver was executed by the Austro-Hungarian military, in which Van Onselen speculates that Silver could have been Jack the Ripper^[6]