William Worger
Biography
Featured in photo: Tom Worger, Bill Worger, and Bantu Holomisa, future leader of the United Democratic Movement, at a wedding in Gazini, Eastern Cape, 2002
William H. Worger specializes in the social and economic history of southern Africa. A New Zealander by birth, his first research project was a study of Te Puea Herangi, a Maori woman who led a cultural and economic revival among the Waikato people in the early 20th century. Since coming to the United States in 1975 he has worked on historical representations of Shaka, the industrial origins of racial discrimination–South Africa’s City of Diamonds: Mine Workers and Monopoly Capitalism in Kimberley, 1867-1895 (Yale University Press, 1987)– and, currently, contestations between African and European over the meaning of colonialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Prior to coming to UCLA in 1989, he taught at Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Dalhousie University. He has also served as Associate Dean of the Graduate Divsion at UCLA, and Dean of the Graduate School at LSU.
Publications
- South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (Longman, 2004, 2nd edition 2010), with Nancy L. Clark
- Africa and the West: A Documentary History, Volume 1: From the Slave Trade to Conquest, 1441-1905; Volume 2: From Colonialism to Independence, 1875 to the Present (New York, Oxford University Press, 2010), with Nancy L. Clark and Edward A. Alpers
- Cosmologies of Power in Southern Africa: Meanings and Practices of Colonial Life (Heinemann, in progress)
- Africa: A History Since 1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, in progress), with Nancy L. Clark
- Africa and the West: A Documentary History from the Slave Trade to Independence (Phoenix, Arizona: Oryx Press, 2001), with Nancy L. Clark and Edward A. Alpers
- “Parsing God: Conversations About the Meanings of Words and Metaphors in Nineteenth Century Southern Africa,” Journal of African History 42 (2001).
- South Africa’s City of Diamonds: Mine Workers and Monopoly Capitalism in Kimberley, 1867-1895 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
