Emeritus Professor Dirk van Zyl Smit was a Professor of Criminology at UCT from 1982 to 2005. In recent years, he has also been a visiting professor at Humboldt University in Berlin and the Catholic University of Leuven, and a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow and later a visiting Global Professor at New York University School of Law. In 2008, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in law from the University of Greifswald, Germany.

Van Zyl Smit is the author of more than 140 academic works, including Life Imprisonment: a Global Human Rights Analysis (with Catherine Appleton), which received the European Society of Criminology Book Award and the Outstanding Book Award of the Division of International Criminology of the American Society of Criminology.