Karin Shapiro CV

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.