History & Art History

Benedict Carton received his Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 1996. He has taught at Wesleyan University and University of Washington, and was twice a Fulbright Scholar in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He is the author of Blood from Your Children: The Colonial Origins of Generational Conflict in South Africa (2000); and co-editor of Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present (forthcoming 2007), a 50-chapter volume. Four of Carton’s most recent studies will appear in Zulu Identities; other articles are in the International Journal of African Historical Studies, Journal of Social History, History in Africa, and Social Justice; as well as several edited books, including Child and Childhood History, Changing Men in South Africa, and Politics of Age and Gerontocracy in Africa. Carton’s scholarship has also been translated into French and German. His developing manuscript, “White Zulu,” explores how racial hybridity and colonial collaboration in South Africa shaped cultural movements in the modern Atlantic world. He and Howard Prof. Robert Edgar edit the Africa section of World History Matters.

Carton has written for news services in South Africa and America, including National Geographic.com, and lectured for the Smithsonian. With colleagues in GMU African American Studies, he has established a university-abroad program in KwaZulu-Natal. In addition, he has worked on three documentary films, most recently as historical consultant for “Heaven’s Herds: Nguni Cattle, Nguni People”; and production assistant for the BBC/SABC-sponsored “A History of Soweto” and NEH-funded “Have You Heard About Johannesburg?” a big screen narrative of the anti-apartheid movement. Carton has participated in human rights projects in Namibia (1989), South Africa (1990-1992) and Haiti (1996). He is currently involved in a community-based endeavor, “Sinomlando, We Have History,” which records testimonies of families in KwaZulu-Natal living with AIDS. The project “Sinomlando” is shaping a new national protocol for oral historians studying trauma and memory in post-apartheid South Africa.

Africa, Environment and Health, Global and Imperial Histories, Oral History