Charles van Onselen

Charles van Onselen (birth 14 August 1944, Boksburg) 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.

Academic career
He is based at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Recognition and awards
He received the Alan Paton Award for The Seed is Mine in 1997.

Personal life
Charles was married to Belinda Bozzoli, and their three children including Gareth van Onselen.

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"
 * 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