Ruth Hall holds the South African Research Chair in Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, which is funded by the National Research Foundation. The Chair is located at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa.

She has published several books, including Africa’s Land Rush, Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions from Below, Another Countryside? and The Land Question in South Africa.

She is a co-founder of the Land Deal Politics Initiative, the BRICS Initiative in Critical Agrarian Studies and the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative.

She is a founding member of the Network of Excellence in Land Governance in Africa (NELGA) and leads training courses for policy makers and professionals on the political economy of land governance in Africa. Ruth also served as a member of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Advisory Panel on Land Reform and she is an editor of the Journal of Peasant Studies.