Dr. Zachary Guthrie is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi.
Research Interests
Dr. Zachary Guthrie's current research focuses on urbanization, development, and race in Mozambique during the 1960s. He is writing a book on these themes, focusing on the history of the Mozambican city of Beira in the 1960s, which examines debates over Mozambique's future through letters and news coverage published in the city's African newspaper, Voz Africana.
Dr. Guthrie's other scholarly interests include the history of forced labor, the history of colonial punishment, and the history of decolonization. He is also interested in methodological questions around the connections between public history, historical memory, and the work of academic historians.
Biography
Dr. Guthrie is an associate professor of history who studies modern southern Africa. He is originally from Washington, DC (the city itself, not Maryland or Virginia!), and he became interested in the history of southern Africa after studying abroad at the University of Cape Town. Prior to working at the University of Mississippi, Dr. Guthrie earned a BA from Wesleyan University and a PhD from Princeton University.
Publications
Labor, Mobility, and Colonial Rule in Central Mozambique, 1940-1965
From the publisher:
Diverging from the studies of southern African migrant labor that focus on particular workplaces and points of origin, Bound for Work looks at the multitude of forms and locales of migrant labor that individuals—under more or less coercive circumstances—engaged in over the course of their lives. Tracing Mozambican workers as they moved between different types of labor across Mozambique, Rhodesia, and South Africa, Zachary Kagan Guthrie places the multiple venues of labor in a single historical frame, expanding the regional historiography beyond the long shadow cast by the apartheid state while simultaneously exploring the continuities and fractures between South Africa, southern Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa.
Selected Article(s):
"Race and Labor in Beira during the Era of Imperial Reform" (2021, Journal of Portuguese History)
"'This Was Being Done Only to Help': Development and Forced Labor in Barue (2017, International Journal of Labor and Working Class History)
"Forced Volunteers: The Contradictions of Coercion in Central Mozambique" (International Journal of African Historical Studies)
“Histories of Mobility, Histories of Labor, Histories of Africa” (2016, African Economic History)
Courses Taught
- HIST 1700 Intro to African History
- HIST 3700 Modern Africa
- HIST 3710 History of Southern Africa
- HIST 5500 Historical Methods & Philosophy of History
- HIST 5710 Historiography of Colonial Africa
- ISNT 2010 African Studies
Education
M.A. History, Princeton University (2010)
Ph.D. History, Princeton University (2014)