Rate My Professor Karin Zipf

Karin Zipf is a Professor of History at East Carolina University, where she has served in the Department of History since August 2001. Born in Durham and raised in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, she graduated from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem and pursued her master’s and doctoral degrees in history at the University of Georgia over six years. Before joining ECU, Zipf taught at North Carolina Wesleyan College and held a faculty position at Appalachian State University from 2000 to 2001. Her academic interests encompass the history of the United States, the American South, and the Atlantic World, with a particular emphasis on gender, sexuality, and race relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century American South. Her research explores themes of marginalized peoples, incarceration, eugenics, and forced labor from the Civil War era to the present.

Zipf has published two major books: Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919 (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), which analyzes the social and legal effects of apprenticeship on historical constructions of family and patriarchal relations, and Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory (LSU Press, 2016), which investigates North Carolina’s institutionalization and sterilization practices for juveniles in the Depression-era South. The latter book earned the 2016 Jules and Frances Landry Award in Southern Studies and the Ragan Old North State Award for Nonfiction. Her scholarly articles on gender, race, women, apprenticeship, and Reconstruction have appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Journal of Women’s History, North Carolina Historical Review, and Georgia Historical Quarterly. Selected works include “Money in the Bank: African American Women, Finance, and Freedom in New Bern, North Carolina, 1868-1874” in New Voyages to Carolina: Reinterpreting North Carolina History (UNC Press, 2017) and “In Defense of the Nation: Syphilis, North Carolina’s ‘Girl Problem,’ and World War I” in North Carolina Historical Review (2012). She created the digital humanities project “Politics of a Massacre: Discovering Wilmington, 1898.” In 2014, she was elected president of the Historical Society of North Carolina. In 2025, Zipf received a National Humanities Center Fellowship for 2025-26 to support her book project “Field Ghosts: The Vanishing American Farmworker and the New Slavery,” examining labor trafficking, peonage, and migrant farm work in the 1970s and 1980s.