Benedict Carton

Associate Professor

Africa, South Africa, transnational race, imperialism, cultural and oral history

Benedict Carton received his Ph.D. in History from Yale University. He has taught at Wesleyan University, University of Washington and University of Natal (now U. KwaZulu-Natal), South Africa, where he was twice a Fulbright scholar. Carton has spent the better part of his life in Southern Africa. A basic list of his scholarly publications and public projects can be sourced here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Benedict_Carton

He is the co-founder of the Center for Mason Legacies.

Doctoral Dissertations Outside CHSS

Martha Mutisi, “Ripening Negotiations and Settlement: The Role of Targeted Sanctions in Zimbabwe’s Global Political Agreement,” PhD Thesis, School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, GMU, 2011.

Alex Owusu, “Detecting and Quantifying the Extent of Desertification and its Impact in the Semi-arid Sub-Saharan Africa,” PhD Thesis, Department of Geography and Geoinformation Science, GMU, 2009.

Doctoral Dissertations Outside GMU

Myra Ann Houser, "Lawyering Against Apartheid: The Southern Africa Project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, 1967-1994," PhD Thesis, Department of African Studies, Howard University, 2014.

Cara Moyer-Duncan, “Projecting Nation? Cinema and the Creation of a National Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” PhD Thesis, Department of African Studies, Howard University, 2011.

Lanisa Kitchener, “Representations of the House in African-American and Black Southern African Women’s Writing,” PhD Thesis, Department of African Studies, Howard University, 2010.

Sheba Lo, “People’s Poet: Mzwakhe Mbuli and the Power of the Poet in the Liberation Struggle and in the ‘New’ South Africa,” PhD Thesis, Department of African Studies, Howard University, 2009.

Rico Chapman, “A Culture of Resistance: Student Activism at the University of Fort Hare, South Africa, 1970-1994,” PhD Thesis, Department of African Studies, Howard University, 2008.

Paul Pressley, “Protest and Resistance in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 1976-1990,” Department of African Studies, Howard University, 2006.

MA Theses Supervised GMU

Director: John Hanebuth, “American Evangelism and Imperialism in Micronesia, 1880-1900,” MA Thesis, Department of History, 2019.

Director: Ann Steensland, “Pathologizing the Bywoner: The Carnegie Commission Report’s Diagnosis of ‘Poor White Disease’ in South Africa (1932),” MA Thesis (266 pages), Department of History, 2013.

Director: Matthew Keaney, “‘I Can Feel My Grin Turn to a Grimace’: From the Sophiatown Shebeens to the Streets of Soweto on the pages of Drum, The Classic, New Classic, and Staffrider,” MA Thesis (323 pages), Department of History, 2010.

Director: Donna Cywinski, “‘History and Our Children Will Defend Us’: Motherism, Christianity and the Gendered Interpretation of Political Morality by the Black Sash of South Africa, 1955-1959,” MA Thesis (213 pages), Department of History, 2010.

Director: Elizabeth Timbs, “US NGO HIV-AIDS Policy in Southern Africa,” MA Thesis (158 pages), Department of History, 2009.

Director: Jennifer Nelson, “Lately, we have disagreed”: Independent Churches in Natal and on the Rand, 1910-1930, MA Thesis (213 pages), Department of History, 2008.

Director: Daniel Wolf, “South Africa-United States Teacher Exchanges in the Cold War Era: USALEP and its Legacies, 1960-1980,” MA Thesis, Department of History, 2004.

Dissertations Supervised

Benjamin Hurwitz, Grazing the Modern World: Merino Sheep in South Africa and the United States, 1775-1840 (2017)

Phyllis E. Slade, A Moral Imperative: The Role of American Black Churches in International Anti-Apartheid Activism (2015)