Melissa Tandiwe Myambo

2017 Writing Fellow, Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg; Research Associate, Centre for Indian Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, University of Johannesburg

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo is a 2017 Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study Writing Fellow and a Research Associate at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2016, she was the recipient of a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award to conduct research in India where she was affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. When the weather is warm, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Links to her other writings can be found on her website www.homosumhumani.com.

Melissa has a PhD in comparative literature from New York University but in addition to teaching comp lit courses, she has also taught sociology, area, global, migration and international development studies. Most vitally, she is an aerobics instructor whose favorite classes to teach are dance, bootcamp and boxing.

Her current research project focusses on "frontier migration," a concept she formulated to analyze the move of people, capital and ideas from a "developed" economy to a "developing" economy.

"Highly-skilled" migrants are moving from more “developed” countries such as the U.S. to the “developing” economies of China, India, and South Africa. Melissa asks why these frontier migrants are heading to the “global South” and examines the microspaces or"cultural time zones" - another concept she formulated - in which they work, live and socialize in their new homes.

Within contemporary frontier migration, she also explores frontier heritage migration—the African and Asian diasporas raised in Euro-America who are now “returning” to their globalizing homelands.

Since colonial times, frontier migrants have been fundamental to what we now experience as cultural-economic globalization. Today’s multi-ethnic, middle-class frontier migrants are responding to and creating the "frontier capitalism" that is currently transforming the global economy.