https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRWj35hEehE&list=PLgBIp6MpvvCNr6moOHOuN54db_xB3kV_5&index=13
In my scholarship, teaching, and much of my service to the profession, I have moved among South and Southern African history, American history, and transnational history and am equally comfortable in all three fields.
My interest in the political economy of race and coerced labor in both societies led to me to examine a dramatic Gilded Age labor rebellion in the Tennessee coalfields against the use of convict workers, the subject of my first book, A New South Rebellion: The Battle against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871-1896 (UNC Press, 1998). I also co-edited, along with scholars from the University of the Witwatersrand’s History Workshop and the Radical History Review, History from South Africa: Alternative Visions and Practices (Temple University Press, 1991). This volume, though now dated, offered more nuanced radical interpretations of South African history and provided exposure to a wide range of American historians who sought deeper historical understandings of that country’s democratic revolution.
Committed to reaching audiences beyond a scholarly community, I have made four films: 1. A Road Out (2025) is a full-length feature documentary about six South African health pioneers who transformed community medicine in North Carolina and beyond. Escaping apartheid, they brought lessons learned in rural KwaZulu-Natal to an American South being reshaped by the Civil Rights Movement. The other films are all shorts: I produced one about the epidemiologist Sherman James and the origins of his John Henryism Hypothesis (2018) and co-produced two others – one on South Africans in North Carolina (2005) and one on the international Fulbright program (2011). I have also curated exhibits on Nelson Mandela (2008) and Jewish history and life in Durham, North Carolina (2013). By and large, these efforts have drawn on my abiding interests in the American South and South Africa.
I am currently writing a biography of Archbishop Walter Khotso Makhulu, archbishop of Central Africa between 1980 and 2000. A graduate of the same seminary and a direct contemporary of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu who served as Archbishop of Cape Town, Makhulu played a key role in the anti-apartheid movement. For years, he secretly funneled money from the Norwegian government and Norwegian state church to a wide variety of anti-apartheid activists inside of South Africa. In addition, he oversaw the demographic transformation of the African bishopric and facilitated the incorporation of African rituals into the Anglican Church in Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi. Archbishop Makhulu was also a critical voice in key debates in the Anglican Church, namely the ordination of women and gay rights.
| Office Location: | 243D Friedl Building, Box 90252, Durham, NC 27708 |
| Email Address: | |
| Web Pages: | https://duke.box.com/s/d2srvt4w222aw76bxzv81r6ct0kax1gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRWj35hEehE&list=PLgBIp6MpvvCNr6moOHOuN54db_xB3kV_5&index=13 |
Teaching (Spring 2025): (typical courses)
| Ph.D. | Yale University | 1991 |
| M.Phil. | Yale University | 1986 |
| M.A. | Yale University | 1983 |
| Honours Degree in History | University of Witwatersrand | 1981 |
| B.A. (hons) | University of Witwatersrand (South Africa) | 1981 |
| B.A. | University of Witwatersrand (South Africa) | 1980 |
Current projects: Archbishop Walter Khotso Makhulu – A biography;, South African emigration policies and law, 1948-94
I study American social and southern history, as well as South African history. My interest in the political economy of race and coerced labor in both societies led to me to examine a dramatic Gilded Age labor rebellion in the Tennessee coalfields against the use of convict workers, the subject of my first book, A New South Rebellion: The Battle against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871-1896 (UNC Press, 1998). I also co-edited, along with scholars from the University of the Witwatersrand’s History Workshop and the Radical History Review, History from South Africa: Alternative Visions and Practices (Temple University Press, 1991). This volume, though now dated, brought both more nuanced radical interpretations of South African history and provided an exposure of History Workshop historians to a wide range of American historians who sought deeper historical understandings of that country’s democratic revolution.
Committed to reaching audiences beyond a scholarly community, I have co-produced two films – one on South Africans in North Carolina (2005) and one on the international Fulbright program (2011) – and have curated exhibits on Nelson Mandela (2008) and the Jewish history and life in Durham, North Carolina (2013). By and large, these efforts have drawn on my abiding interests in the American South and South Africa.
I am now engaged in three distinct projects. The first consists of a biographical essay of Archbishop Walter Khotso Makhulu, archbishop of Central Africa between 1980 and 2000. A graduate of the same seminary and a direct contemporary of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu who served as Archbishop of Cape Town, Makhulu was a key figure in the anti-apartheid movement. For years, he secretly funneled money from the Norwegian government and Norwegian state church to a wide variety of anti-apartheid activists inside of South Africa. In addition, he oversaw the demographic transformation of the African bishopric and facilitated the incorporation of African rituals into the Anglican Church in Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi.
Second, I am exploring the evolution of South African’s emigration policy and its relationship to notions of citizenship and state formation, the ways in which passports and other kinds of travel documents formed part of the oppressive apparatus of the apartheid-era governments, and the movement of people and ideas from South Africa to the United States.
Third, I am researching the transnational careers of seven influential South African medics who came to North Carolina in the 1950s and ‘60s to work at Duke and UNC, Chapel Hill. Primarily epidemiologists and family and community medicine doctors and shaped by a "social medicine" approach, many of these pioneering social medics left South Africa when the National Party introduced apartheid in the late 1940s/1950s. Several ended up in North Carolina, where they had long and illustrious careers. I am interested in the ways in which these medics continued to explore the impact of social environment on health through epidemiological studies of North Carolina communities, as well as their efforts to establish health care facilities that harkened back to those they had created in South Africa.