Mattie Christine Webb
Historian || Writer || Teacher
I am a social and political historian of the United States and southern Africa in the twentieth century. Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University's Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy at the Jackson School of Global Affairs, Lecturer with Yale's Department of History, and an Affiliate Scholar with Rhodes University's Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) in South Africa.
I earned my Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2023. My research sits at the nexus of transnational labor and social movements, Black internationalism, African studies, and U.S. foreign relations, and has been generously funded by a Fulbright Fellowship, a Boren Fellowship, and various other grants.
My book project, Diplomacy at Work: South African Workers & U.S. Multinational Companies During Apartheid (under advanced contract with Columbia University Press), offers a new social and political history of the anti-apartheid movement, placing South African workers at the center of global narratives of labor and empire in international relations.
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I am currently working on a number of writing projects, many of them public-facing. One is an archives project on the American Committee on Africa and its ties to worker-based movements against apartheid. The other is a piece for an edited volume on multipolarity. Finally, I am also writing a case study on the anti-apartheid movement and South African liberation movements, which will be used by undergraduates in Yale's Grand Strategy course.
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As a public historian, I am also spearheading an oral history archives project based predominantly in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, which includes numerous interviews with South African workers, trade unionists, and anti-apartheid activists. Working with NALSU as well as archivists at the University of Fort Hare, I am preparing my interviews for donation and the creation of an archive.
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I hold a master’s degree in Global Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I wrote my thesis on economic sanctions as a tool to promote regime change, surveying a range of case studies from across the globe. I received my BA summa cum laude in History from North Carolina State University in 2014.
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Beyond my academic work, I am a competitive long distance runner. I was a Division I Track & Field and Cross Country athlete, competing for both North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I've wedded this interest with my research in South Africa, where I volunteer with a local running after school program for rural South African youth. I ran South Africa's historically-significant Comrades Ultra-Marathon (an 88K race in KwaZulu Natal) in June 2024. I hope to eventually incorporate the history of Comrades and other global running events into a book project on the role of sport in the fight against apartheid.
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I am primarily based in New Haven, Connecticut and am currently available for speaking engagements, collaborative work, and guest lectures. I sometimes split time between the United States and South Africa.