Karin L. Zipf 
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., University of Georgia
Phone: 252-328-1024
Office: Brewster A-219
Fax: 252-328-6774
Email: zipfk@ecu.edu
Web: http://core.ecu.edu/hist/zipfk
Dr. Karin Zipf's North Carolina roots run deep. Born in Durham and raised in Rocky Mount, she developed a fascination for southern history. As a college student, she attended and graduated from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. After six years pursuing her masters and doctoral degrees in history at the University of Georgia, Zipf returned to North Carolina to teach at North Carolina Wesleyan College. From 2000-01 she served on the faculty at Appalachian State University in Boone. In August 2001, she joined the East Carolina University History Department in Greenville, where she hopes that she has completed her very comprehensive "tour" of the state.
As her life and career have progressed, Dr. Zipf has reaffirmed her deep and abiding intellectual interest in the history of the United States, the American South, and North Carolina. Her interests lie in the region's political culture and gender and race relations. Her book, Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919 appeared in 2005. Labor of Innocents examines the social and legal impact of apprenticeship on historical constructions of the family and patriarchal relations. Her articles on gender, race, women, apprenticeship, and Reconstruction have appeared in the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of Women's History, the North Carolina Historical Review, and the Georgia Historical Quarterly. Her next project examines North Carolina’s public welfare system from 1885-1996.
Selected Publications:
Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919 (LSU Press, 2005).
“No Longer Under Cover(ture): Marriage, Divorce and Gender in the 1868 Constitutional Convention.” Paul D. Escott, ed. Struggles over Change: North Carolinians in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
“Orphans, Bastards, and Free Black Children: North Carolina Apprenticeship, 1715-1860.” Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray, eds. Bound to Labor: Varieties of Apprenticeship in Early America. In review at Pennsylvania State University Press.
Courses Offered:
HIST 1050: American History to 1877
HIST 3140: Women in American History
HIST 3245: The United States Since 1945
HIST 5220: Gender and the Cold War (Selected Topics in US Women’s History)
WOST 4000: Senior Seminar in Women’s Studies
