Karin L. Zipf (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)

Karin Zipf is a professor of history at East Carolina University where she has taught courses on American history, history of the US South, and history of gender, sexuality and US women for 25 years. Her research concentrates on labor, gender, sexuality, incarceration, eugenics, agriculture, and human trafficking in the American South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her books have won numerous awards, including the Binkley-Stephenson Award for Best Article in the Journal of American History in 2024, the Jules and Frances Landry Award for Outstanding Book in Southern Studies (2016), and the Ragan Old North State Award for Non-Fiction (2016). Zipf is an active member of her community in Greenville, North Carolina. She is an officer in the ECU chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and serves in environmental and environmental justice organizations in Pitt County.

Selected Publications

• Zipf, Karin. “Exposing the Masculinist Narrative in Federal Antislavery Law: A History of U.S. v. Tony Booker (1980).” Journal of American History 110, no. 4 (March 2024): 689–714.
• Zipf, Karin. “‘Money in the Bank’: African-American Women, Finance and Freedom in Reconstruction New Bern, North Carolina, 1868–1874.” In New Voyages to Carolina: Toward a Reinterpretation of North Carolina History, edited by Larry Tise and Jeffrey Crow, 166–93. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
• Zipf, Karin. Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2016.
• Zipf, Karin. Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715–1919. Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2005.