
Joel Cabrita
Associate Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Religious Studies
Bio
Joel Cabrita is a historian of modern Southern Africa who focuses on Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and South Africa. She examines the transnational networks of the Southern African region including those which connect Southern Africans to the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. Her most recent book (The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement, Harvard University Press, 2018) investigates the convergence of evangelical piety, transnational networks and the rise of industrialized societies in both Southern Africa and North America. The People's Zion was awarded the American Society of Church History's Albert C Outler Prize for 2019 https://churchhistory.org/grants-and-awards/ She is also the co-editor of a volume examining the global dimensions of Christian practice, advocating for a shift away from Western Christianity to the lateral connections connecting southern hemisphere religious practitioners (Relocating World Christianity, Brill, 2017).
Cabrita has a long-standing interest in how Southern Africans used and transformed a range of old and new media forms. Her first book (Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church, Cambridge University Press, 2014) investigates the print culture of a large South African religious organization, while her edited collection (Religion, Media and Marginality in Africa, Ohio University Press, 2018) focuses on the intersection of media, Islam, Christianity and political expression in modern Africa.
Her current project (under contract with Ohio University Press) is the biography of a pioneering African feminist, Christian Pentecostal pioneer and liberation leader, Regina Gelana Twala (1908 – 1968), who co-founded Swaziland’s first political party in 1960 and introduced the Assemblies of God denomination to the region. Celebrated during her lifetime, Twala’s remarkable story is today largely forgotten, in part a consequence of her untimely death in 1968, one month before Swaziland’s independence. Cabrita’s project considers the radically new perspective a figure such as Twala affords on the contribution of women to Africa’s anti-colonial liberation movements and to evangelical history. The book will probe the politics of memory whereby certain African nationalist and religious icons have been erased from the historical record.
Cabrita did her PhD at the University of Cambridge and was subsequently a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Before moving to Stanford, she held permanent posts at SOAS (University of London) and the University of Cambridge. Her research has been recognized by two major early-career research prizes, the British Arts and Humanities Early Career Research Fellowship (2015) and the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2017).
Academic Appointments
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Associate Professor, History
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Associate Professor (By courtesy), Religious Studies
Professional Education
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Ph.D, University of Cambridge
2022-23 Courses
- PRACTICAL TRAINING
INTNLREL 189 (Sum) - Research Seminar in African History
HISTORY 445B (Sum) - Show and Tell: Creating Provenance Histories of African Art
HISTORY 46N (Spr) -
Independent Studies (6)
- Graduate Directed Reading
HISTORY 399W (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Graduate Research
HISTORY 499X (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Senior Research I
HISTORY 299A (Aut, Win, Spr) - Senior Research II
HISTORY 299B (Aut, Win, Spr) - Senior Research III
HISTORY 299C (Win, Spr) - Undergraduate Directed Research and Writing
HISTORY 299S (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum)
- Graduate Directed Reading
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Prior Year Courses
2021-22 Courses
- Doing Religious History
HISTORY 200P (Win) - PRACTICAL TRAINING
INTNLREL 189 (Sum)
2020-21 Courses
- Africa in the 20th Century
AFRICAAM 145B, HISTORY 145B (Spr) - Africa in the 20th Century
HISTORY 45B (Spr) - Religion, Radicalization and Media in Africa since 1945
AFRICAST 248, AFRICAST 348, HISTORY 248, HISTORY 348, RELIGST 230X, RELIGST 330X (Spr) - Visible Bodies: Black Female Authors and the Politics of Publishing in Africa
HISTORY 41N (Win) - Women and Autobiography in African History
HISTORY 346F (Win)
2019-20 Courses
- Africa in the 20th Century
AFRICAAM 145B, HISTORY 145B (Spr) - Africa in the 20th Century
HISTORY 45B (Spr) - Power, Prestige and Politics in African Societies
HISTORY 45N (Win) - Religion, Radicalization and Media in Africa since 1945
AFRICAST 248, AFRICAST 348, HISTORY 248, HISTORY 348, RELIGST 230X, RELIGST 330X (Spr) - Women in African history, Gender in Herstory
HISTORY 346F (Win)
- Doing Religious History
Stanford Advisees
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Doctoral Dissertation Reader (AC)
Gloria Chikaonda -
Orals Evaluator
Kyle Harmse, Ozgul Ozdemir -
Doctoral Dissertation Advisor (AC)
Caryce Tirop -
Doctoral Dissertation Co-Advisor (AC)
Janice Ndegwa, Adele Stock, Wallace Teska -
Doctoral (Program)
Mathew Ayodele, Wallace Teska, Caryce Tirop
All Publications
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Writing Apartheid: Ethnographic Collaborators and the Politics of Knowledge Production in Twentieth- Century South Africa
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
2020; 125 (5): 1668–98
View details for Web of Science ID 000607862400004
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Faith, Power and Family: Christianity and Social Change in French Cameroon (Book Review)
STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY
2020; 26 (2): 204–6
View details for DOI 10.3366/swc.2020.0300
View details for Web of Science ID 000538166600011