Joel Cabrita

Joel Cabrita is Professor of History at Stanford University and Director of the Center for African Studies. She is currently writing the first sustained history of CIA operations in apartheid South Africa. The book traces U.S. intelligence networks from the 1950s to the 1980s - including the CIA’s role in Nelson Mandela’s 1962 arrest - showing how evangelical Protestant worldviews shaped American interventions in Africa’s Cold War.

Cabrita’s earlier work has consistently uncovered histories silenced or erased. Her first book, Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church (2014), explored the political vision of a small religious community, while The People’s Zion (2018) revealed transatlantic links between Illinois and the fifteen-million-strong Zionist churches of Southern Africa. It earned the Philip Leverhulme Prize and the American Society of Church History’s Global Christianity Book Prize. Her third book, Written Out (2023), recovered the life of Regina Twala, a Black feminist intellectual whose writings were buried under white scholars’ names. It won South Africa’s National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Biography Prize, was shortlisted for the ASAUK Best Book Prize, and earned Cabrita an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University.

Beyond her books, Cabrita has curated international exhibitions, digitized archives with students, and published widely for scholarly and public audiences, including TIME and The Guardian. Across all her projects, she brings to light what has been overlooked - whether the civic life of African churches, the erased transnational roots of African Christianity, the intellectual traditions forged by Black women thinkers, or the covert operations of the CIA in apartheid South Africa. She welcomes applications from graduate students interested in working on any aspect of African history.