Professor Venitha Pillay

Professor Venitha Pillay is an associate professor in the department of educational leadership and management at the Unisa’s College of Education. Previously, Pillay served at UP, and between 2013 and 2016 was simultaneously a short-term education consultant at the World Bank in Washington DC. She completed her PhD in higher education institutional mergers at UP in 2003.

Pillay’s first book, Academic Mothers (2007), argues that motherhood is a form of subjugated knowledge, and that academic mothers bear a responsibility for inserting motherhood into academic thinking. Her second book, Academic Mothers in the Developing World: Stories from India, Brazil and South Africa (2017), which she co-authored with academics from these countries, focuses on power and powerlessness among academic mothers in these countries.

In 2017, Pillay received an NRF competitive grant for rated researchers. The grant covers a three-year study of women in higher education in South Africa and aims to understand how being a woman shapes scholarship. Her work also includes publications on what it means to be a black woman researcher in a developing country. Pillay’s research conviction is underpinned by a key goal of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and the National Development Plan of South Africa, namely that the educational empowerment of women is critical to global and national economic and social development.

She has an NRF C2 rating, and is the author of over 35 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. She served on the editorial board of the first feminist journal in South Africa, Agenda, for over 10 years. She was the project leader for the Women in Research programme at the Vaal University of Technology (2009 and 2010), through which six developing researchers achieved their first publications. Since 2009, Pillay has successfully supervised 12 PhD and four master’s students. Her international reputation is evidenced by invitations from the Salzburg Global Seminar Series, the Next Generation Global Leader’s Forum in Japan, and her work with international development agencies.