Mattie Christine Webb

I am a social and political historian of the United States and southern Africa in the twentieth century. Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Associate and Kissinger Visiting Scholar at Yale University's Jackson School of Global Affairs and International Security Studies (ISS).

 

I earned my Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2023. Since 2021, I have been an Affiliate Scholar with Rhodes University's Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) in South Africa. Interested in policy-driven research, I am also an International Policy Scholar Consortium and Network (IPSCON) Fellow with Johns Hopkins University (SAIS). My research sits at the nexus of transnational labor movements, Black internationalism, and U.S. foreign policy, and has been generously funded by a Fulbright Fellowship, a Boren Fellowship, and various other grants.

 

My book project, Diplomacy at Work: The South African Worker, U.S. Multinationals, and Transnational Racial Solidarity (1972-1994), presents a new social and political history of the anti-apartheid movement, placing local South African workers at the center of global narratives of empire, U.S. corporate imperialism, and Black internationalism. This project, based on an examination of extensive oral histories and multilingual archival materials from the United States, United Kingdom, and South Africa, ultimately complicates the role of U.S. multinational corporations during the late apartheid era, highlighting how workers and trade unionists leveraged reformist workplace codes of conduct, such as the Sullivan Principles. 

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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 the Western Cape and Fort Hare University, I am preparing my interviews for donation.