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Mattie Christine Webb

Historian || Writer || Teacher || Runner

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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. 

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.

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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, with a specific focus on the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986. I received my BA summa cum laude in History from North Carolina State University in 2014. 

Beyond my academic work, I am a competitive distance runner. I was a Division I Track & Field and Cross Country athlete throughout my BA and MA programs, competing for both North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I've wedded this interest with my research trips to South Africa, where I volunteer with a local running after school program for rural South African youth. 

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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.

Contact

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