Karen Flint

Publications

• “‘Africa isn’t a testing lab’: Considering COVID Vaccine Trials in a History of Biomedical Experimentation and Abuse.” Journal of West African History,  Vol 6, 2 (2020), 122-136.
• “African Women and Health: Evolving Challenges.” In Holding the World Together: African Women in Changing Perspective, eds. Claire Robertson and Nwando Achebe. Madison: Wisconsin Press, 2019.
• “Compounding Traditions: From “Untraditional” Healers to Modern Bioprospectors of South Africa’s Medicinal Plants.” In Theatrum Botanicum, eds. Uriel Orlow and Shela Sheikh. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018.
• “Health and Medicine in African History.”  In  A Companion to African History, eds. William Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing,  2018.
• “Reinventing ‘Traditional’ Medicine in Post-apartheid South Africa.” In Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America. Athens: Ohio Press, 2012.
• (with Bridget Teboh). “The Impact of Globalization on Health, Food Security, and Biomedicine in Africa.”  In Globalization and the African Experience Durham: Carolina Academic Press: 2012.
• Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820-1948. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. (Melville J. Herskovits Finalist, 2009)
• (with Julie Parle) “Healers, Witchcraft, and Madness” in Zulu Identities: Being Zulu Past and Present. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press: 2008.
• “Indian-African Encounters: Polyculturalism & African Therapeutics in Natal, South Africa, 1820-1948.” Journal of Southern African Studies. (32.2: June 2006)
• “Competition, Race and Professionalization: African Healers and White Medical Practitioners in Natal, South Africa in the Early Twentieth Century” Social History of Medicine vol. 14. No 2. August 2001.

Oral History Archives

• “Brooklyn Oral History Project,” this is a web-based archive of oral histories regarding urban renewal and Charlotte’s former Brooklyn (Second Ward) neighborhood. The webpage also includes a brief history, timeline, and bibliography.
• “The Queen’s Garden,” this archive of oral histories explores the stories of those who grow, cultivate, produce, and distribute fresh food in the greater Charlotte area.

Research Interests

Southern Africa; Science, Technology and Medicine; Indigenous Knowledges; Public History; Food and Agriculture; and Globalization.

Courses Taught

• HIST 2600 Comparative Slaveries in African History
• HIST 2211 Modern Africa
• HIST 2210 Precolonial Africa
• HIST 3154 Africa & Globalization
• HIST 3155 Health & Healing in Africa
• HIST 4002 Great Debates in African History
• HIST 4600 Gender and Sex in African History
• HIST 6000 Oral History and Memory
• HIST 6694 Seminar in Historical Writing
• LBST 2102 Food Fight: The history and politics of what we eat.

Biography

Education:

Ph.D. in History, University of California, Los Angeles, 2001. Post-Baccalaureate in African Studies, University of Cape Town. BA Sociology/Anthropology, Lawrence University.

Current Projects

I am currently working on a book-length project that examines how biomedicine and doctors both empowered and disrupted the system of South African indenture (1860-1911). Biomedicine was used and imagined as a tool of empire and industry, and also subject to the competing visions and responsibilities of various colonial forces, doctors, and the emergent field of public health. I am particularly interested in the international dimensions of this phenomenon, from negotiations between various colonial powers—Britain, India, and Natal—to evolving biomedical understandings of diseases like hookworm.  In particular, I seek to determine the conditions, such as the rise of a public health administration, that emboldened whistle-blowers who nudged reform in a system overwhelmingly stacked in the favor of the rich and powerful.