Karen Flint

Recent Publications

• “Reinventing ‘Traditional’ Medicine in Post apartheid South Africa,” in Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America.  (Ohio Press: 2012)
• (with Bridget Teboh). “The Impact of Globalization on Health, Food Security, and Biomedicine in Africa.”  In Globalization and the African Experience (Carolina Academic Press: 2012)
• Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820-1948. (Ohio University Press, 2008) (Melville J. Herskovits Finalist Award 2009)
• (with Julie Parle) “Healers, Witchcraft, and Madness” in Zulu Identities: Being Zulu Past and Present (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.
• “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.

Research Interests

Southern Africa; Science, Technology and Medicine; Cultural Studies; Gender Studies; Public History; and Globalization

Courses Taught

• HIST 2600 Comparative Slaveries in African History
• HIST 2211 Modern Africa
• HIST 2210 Precolonial Africa
• HIST 3000 Africa & Globalization
• HIST 3002 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
• LBST 2102 Food Fight: The history and poltiics of what we eat.

Biography

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2001.

Current Projects

I am currently working on a book length project, tentatively titled: Toils and Tensions of Empire: struggles to control medicine, health and indentured Indian labor in Natal, South Africa. I am also interested in how ideas of race, culture, geography, and climate intersect, particularly with regards to British health tourism to the tropics prior to the 1930s, and life insurance coverage to persons visiting and living in the tropics.