Professor Jonathan Jansen is an NRF A1-rated researcher and is currently a Distinguished Professor of Education at Stellenbosch University. As one of the world’s leading curriculum theorists, he has achieved the rare feat of having a lifetime of scholarship recognised on both sides of the Atlantic by elected peers in two of the most prestigious learned societies in the world – the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy for the Social Sciences and Humanities. He has made an exceptional and enduring contribution to South African higher education, scholarship, and society throughout a distinguished career spanning several decades. Beyond his substantial scholarly record, Prof Jansen has demonstrated outstanding leadership as a Distinguished Professor, Dean, and Vice-Chancellor, while also making significant contributions through national research, advisory, and policy-development initiatives.

Prof Jansen’s extensive national and international standing is evidenced by numerous prestigious honours, fellowships, and lifetime achievement recognitions from leading academic and professional bodies. He has received prestigious international fellowships such as the Chin Yidan Fellowship at Harvard University, a Fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University, and election to the International Academy of Education, a small fellowship of leading education scholars around the world. The intellectual thread that runs through all his major book publications is a concern with the politics, poetics, purposes and production of knowledge represented in books such as Knowledge in the Blood (Stanford), followed by The politics of knowledge in the biomedical sciences (Springer, with Auerbach), The decolonization of knowledge (Cambridge, with Walters) and On discovery: how knowledge is discovered across the disciplines (Cambridge). His journal publications have appeared in all the major education research outlets around the world, including the Cambridge Journal of Education, the Harvard Educational Review, the Oxford Review of Education, Comparative Education, Comparative Education Review, Research Policy and more.

A theorist and practitioner in equal measure, there is an urgency to his work in both schools and universities. Between 2023 and 2025, for example, Prof Jansen immersed himself in a high school with the worst NSC results in two roles – a social scientist trying to understand the problem and a turnaround specialist trying to change it. He not only co-led the change with the principal and her team from the top down but also taught science classes in that school to understand the problem from the bottom up. This intervention dramatically increased school performance, and the results of the study appear in a new book called Worth the fight: fixing failure in South African schools (Jonathan Ball) and will be distributed “free of charge” to every high school in South Africa.