Ranger founded the Britain Zimbabwe Society with Guy Clutton-Brock, of which he was president (2006–14). During 1980–82 he was President of the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) and from 1981 to 1982 President of the Ecclesiastical History Society. During this time he also published his widely influential work The Invention of Tradition (1983) in collaboration with Eric Hobsbawm. With the change of regime Ranger was allowed back into Zimbabwe, which allowed him to undertake research for his book Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War, a comparative account of the ways in which ideas were formed among rural people, which was published in 1985. In 1987, he was appointed Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at Oxford University. In the 1990s he undertook two research projects on the history of the Matabeleland region of Zimbabwe, Voices from the Rocks (1999) and Violence and Memory (2000), as well as Are We Not Also Men? (1995), a biography of the Zimbabwean Samkange dynasty (the most well-known member of which is Stanlake J. W. T. Samkange), drawing on their extraordinary collection of personal papers. Ranger retired in 1997 but continued as an emeritus fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and spent time at the University of Zimbabwe, where he undertook research for his book Bulawayo Burning (2010), which explores Bulawayo's urban cultural history. Upon returning to the UK, he published influential articles on Zimbabwe's economic crisis and worked with Zimbabwean refugees coming to the UK, becoming a founding trustee of the charity Asylum Welcome, along with his wife Shelagh, and wrote more than 170 reports addressed to the Home Office regarding asylum cases. In retirement, Ranger was made a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. In 2013 he published his memoir, entitled Writing Revolt. He was the first Africanist fellow of the British Academy and the first historian of Africa to sit on the board of the historical journal Past & Present. He died at his home in Oxford on 3 January 2015 at the age of 85. Selected bibliography Complete bibliography in ACAS Review 89. Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896–97. London: Heinemann (1967, 2nd edn 1979). Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe: A Comparative Study. Oxford: James Currey (1985). . Editor, with Ngwabi Bhebe, Soldiers in Zimbabwe's Liberation War. Oxford: James Currey (1995). Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920–64. Oxford: James Currey