ECU history professor awarded prestigious National Humanities Center Fellowship
Dr. Karin Zipf, an East Carolina University professor of history in the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences, is a recipient of a National Humanities Center Fellowship for the 2025-26 academic year. The center, located in the Research Triangle Park, is one of the most prestigious independent research institutes in the world, and the only one dedicated exclusively to the humanities.
As a fellow, Zipf will live in the Raleigh area and will receive assistance from the center’s team of librarians to complete work on her current book project.
Dr. Karin Zipf, a professor of history, has been awarded a prestigious National Humanities Center Fellowship for the 2025-26 academic year. (Contributed photo)
“The opportunity is amazing,” Zipf said. “It allows me to fulfill a major professional goal.”
Zipf’s research focuses on Southern United States history, with an emphasis on marginalized peoples. Her specific interests include incarceration, eugenics and forced labor from the Civil War to the present.
The fellowship will support Zipf’s book draft, “Field Ghosts: The Vanishing American Farmworker and the New Slavery.” She said the book traces a historical arc that involves labor, agriculture, race, Southern racism, immigration and immigration reform. She focuses on labor trafficking and migrant agricultural work from Florida to Maine in the 1970s and ’80s.
She is particularly interested in the problem of peonage — a form of slavery where workers are bonded by debt to their employers, whether real or imagined. Zipf said she is interested in how farm workers suffered and how they fought peonage through legal services. She seeks to address the questions: What did farm workers do? Who was helping them? How were they aligning to fight back and make change?
In addition, Zipf will examine the transition period when growers implemented a backlash against workers by lobbying the Reagan administration to pass new immigration reform, allowing for temporary workers to come into the country as outsourced labor.
Zipf became interested in these topics at the age of 12, after learning about slavery and the Civil War in school. She said she went home to tell her dad how awful slavery was and that she was glad it no longer existed.
This map demonstrates the scope of national migratory patterns in the United States in 1981. North Carolina ranked fourth among states in the number of migrant farm workers who worked in the state each year. (Reprinted from Edward F. Dement, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: An Update on Migrant Farmworker Issues in Today’s Agricultural Labor Market,” March 1985)
Her father was a doctor and forensic pathologist at a laboratory at Nash General Hospital, where he conducted autopsies on farm workers from the fields. She remembers that he told her, “There is still slavery in the United States, and it is happening here, now in the fields where workers suffer terrible debt and horrible working conditions.”
Zipf said she would come to understand the topic better and learn how to research the issue as a graduate student. She said historians can develop research skills — the tools of their trade — that allow them to ask and answer seemingly unanswerable lifelong questions.
Upon completing the book, Zipf hopes readers gain a better understanding of the issue of forced labor.
“I want college students to read this book. One of the things I want them to understand is that, especially with peonage, with debt and slavery, it can happen to anyone,” Zipf said. “On a personal level, they can see how an employer ensnares his employees into that kind of service, and that is illegal.”
At a broader societal level, Zipf wants her readers to understand how food is grown and harvested, and that working conditions have not improved.
“Growers are not willing to pay Americans what they want to work in the fields,” she said. “It’s not that Americans are too lazy to pick blueberries. It’s that they don’t want to work in conditions where they have no sanitation, where they have no access to safe showers, where they have no access to decent food, and they certainly don’t have access to decent housing. So, Americans are doing what they do best. They are protesting the conditions by not working in those circumstances.”
As a result, Zipf said farmers lobbied the federal government for policies that allowed temporary outsourcing of workers from other countries.
When Zipf returns to her teaching role, she said she wants to contribute to the discussion of slavery through the department’s “History 1776: Foundations of American Democracy” class, a course resulting from a new state-required mandate.
“The teaching of slavery and freedom is one of the major goals of ‘History 1776,’” she said. “The documents said slavery more or less ended with the Civil War, but we can see forced labor continues in many forms.”
In 1979, Dr. John Moses, a physician at Duke University, researched rural health at farm worker housing camps. This photograph, taken near Asheville, represents typical farm worker housing. Workers in the eastern part of the state usually lived in barracks. (Photo by John Moses, box 2, Rubenstein Library Collection, Duke University)
Zipf said her research will continue to provide her a greater understanding of the topic of American slavery and help inform not only her book, but also her teaching.
“Dr. Zipf’s fellowship is a wonderful recognition of her national reputation as a scholar of North Carolina history,” said Dr. Timothy Jenks, chair and associate professor in the Department of History. “The department is extraordinarily proud of this opportunity, which will permit Dr. Zipf the necessary time to write her third book. NHC fellowships provide great opportunities for scholars, and it is great that ECU is receiving such support.”
Zipf said she spent many years preparing for the fellowship application. The effort required a three-pronged approach that boosted her to the competitive level. First, an earlier fellowship at the Yale University Gilder Lehrman Center enabled her to publish a major journal article from her book project, which she accomplished in March 2024. Second, she sought out references from previous fellows and scholars at universities with close ties to the center. Finally, she credits the assistance from a grant-writing seminar for humanities faculty led by ECU’s Dr. Will Banks, director of the university writing program and a professor of English, and Dr. Kerri Flinchbaugh, assistant director of the university writing program.
“Both Dr. Banks and Dr. Flinchbaugh come from outside of a historical background, and it was helpful to get their viewpoint,” Zipf said.
“Will Banks knows what he is doing in reviewing and critiquing a grant proposal at the national level. I cannot extend enough thanks to him for the careful eye he brought to my proposal and how he helped me understand how to address an audience of humanities scholars beyond my field,” she said.
“Kerri Flinchbaugh also was incredible,” Zipf said. “Sometimes you forget about the human story, you fail to see the forest through the trees. What Kerri did was force me to consider the human story in a way I previously could not see.”