Professor of History and Ethnic Studies Profile Image
Professor of History and Ethnic Studies History dcurry2@unl.edu 402-472-2414 625 Oldfather Hall
JOINED DEPARTMENT

January 2006

BIO

Dawne Y. Curry is a Professor of History and Ethnic Studies. She received her Ph.D. in African History from Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan in 2006. Curry’s research field is 20th and 21st century African history with an emphasis on South African protest and resistance struggles. She also explores oral history, women and gender studies, comparative black history, and African colonial history. This Fulbright Scholar (South Africa, 2017-2018) is the author of Social Justice at Apartheid’s Dawn: African Women Intellectuals and the Quest to Save the Nation (2022) and Apartheid on a Black Isle: Removal and Resistance in Alexandra, South Africa (2012).

Curry is currently working on three projects: exiled and banished South African women, a co-edited anthology on South African women in the United States, and a short history of Mina Tembeka Soga. When Curry is not researching or teaching, she loves to travel around the world and listen to live music.

SELECTED GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS
  • James A. Rawley Research Grant, Department of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2019
  • College of Arts of Sciences Enhance Grant, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2018
  • US Department of State, Fulbright Africa Research Travel Program (RTP), April 2018
  • International Collaboration Grant, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2018
  • US Department of State, US Fulbright Scholar to South Africa (2017-2018)
  • James A. Rawley Research Grant, Department of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2017
  • Nebraska Arts Council Grant, 2016
  • Nebraska Humanities Council Grant, 2016
  • Diversity Council Grant, 2016
  • Arts and Humanities Enhancement Fellowship, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2016
  • Research Council Grant-in-Aid, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2015
  • Charles Henry Oldfather Research Grant, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2015
  • Clay Thomas Research Grant, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2015
BOOKS

  • Social Justice at Apartheid’s Dawn: African Women Intellectuals and the Quest to Save the Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
  • Apartheid on a Black Isle: Removal and Resistance in Alexandra, South Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
  • Co-Editor, with Eric D. Duke and Marshanda Smith, Extending the Diaspora: New Histories of Black People (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
  • “A Nation She Defined and Constructed:” Lillian Tshabalala, the Daughters of Africa, and Nation-building in Segregated South Africa in the 1930s, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, Special Issue: Transnational Networks of Gender and Race in South Africa and the United States, 1 (January 19, 2018): 55-76.
  • “Through the Doors of Return:” Paul Robeson and Miriam Makeba’s ‘Migration’ to Africa,” New Frontiers in the Study of the Global African Diaspora: Between Unchartered Themes and Alternative Representations, editors Glenn Anthony Chambers, Tama Hamilton-Wray, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018), 135-148.
  • “Their World is a Ghetto: Squatters, Space, and Power in 1940s Alexandra, South Africa,” in Wendy Goldman and Joe Trotter (ed). The Ghetto in Global History, 1500 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2018), 277-293.
  • “Considered Coloured or Honorary White: African Americans in South Africa” in Extending the Diaspora: New Histories of Black People (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 270-290.
  • “When Apartheid Interfered with Funerals: We Found Ways to Grieve in Alexandra, South Africa,” International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, 2, 2, (2007), 245-252.
  • “An African American Constructs and Confronts the Social Construction of Race in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Safundi: Journal of South Africa and American Studies, 7, 2 (April 2006): 1-26.
SELECTED CONFERENCE PAPERS
  • Black Internationalism: In Stereo, On Fire and In Threads, South African Historiographical Colloquium, the University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa, July 2019.
  • Keynote Lecture, Fulbright Pre-Departure Orientation, Pretoria, South Africa, 2018, 2019 (declined due to previous engagement).
  • “The Nation She Defined:” Lillian Tshabalala and Threats to African Unity, Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana (West Africa), April 26, 2018.
  • “What is it We Call the Nation:” Cecilia Lillian Tshabalala’s Definition, Diagnosis and Prognosis of Nation in Segregated South Africa, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa, March 2018.
  • “Banned, Censored, Exiled:” South African Women under Apartheid, 61st African Studies Association, Atlanta, Georgia, November 28-December 2, 2018.
  • “Their World Was a Ghetto:” Power in Alexandra’s Squatters Movement, African Studies Lecture Series, the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, April 16-18, 2017.
  • Eulogies of Childhood: Death, Remembrance and Oral Obituaries in Apartheid, South Africa, 59th Annual African Studies Association, Washington, DC, 2016.
  • “From Banned to Banished: African Women’s Stories of Insiles,” “Rethinking Apartheid’s Golden Age, South Africa c. 1966-1979,” University of Pretoria, South Africa, June 2016.
  • “Gendering Her Nations: Cecilia Lilian Tshabalala and Constructions of Communalism and Political Womanhood in Segregated South Africa,” 58th Annual African Studies Association Meeting, Indianapolis, IN, November 20-23, 2014.
  • “What the Obituaries Say:” Analyzing the Oral and Written in South African Eulogies, 4th International Toyin Falola Annual Conference (TOFAC): Durban, South Africa: 3rd-5th July 2014.
CURRICULUM VITAE
EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND

Ph.D., Michigan State University, 2006
M.A., Ohio University, 1996
B.A., University of Mary Washington, 1990

EXPERTISE

20th Century Sub-Saharan African History;
South African History and protest struggles;
Women and Gender in African History;
African Colonial History;
Comparative Black History;
Oral History