Elizabeth Thornberry
VerifiedJohns Hopkins University · History
Active 2010–2020
About
Elizabeth Thornberry is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. She is a historian specializing in the history of South Africa, with research and teaching interests in gender, sexuality, law, and disability in Southern Africa and across the continent. Thornberry earned her Ph.D. in African History from Stanford University in 2011. Her scholarly work includes a book titled 'Colonizing Consent: Rape and Governance in South Africa’s Eastern Cape,' which explores sexual violence and political authority in the region from the late precolonial period through segregationism. Her current research projects include an intellectual history of customary law in South Africa, focusing on debates among black intellectuals about 'native law and custom' from 1880 to 1927, and a history of intellectual disability in segregation-era South Africa, particularly concerning childhood and state efforts to measure and care for intellectually disabled children across racial lines. Thornberry has held research support from notable institutions such as the Fulbright Institute, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center, and the Mellon Foundation. She has also served on the board of the American Society for Legal History and is co-chair of the program committee for the Northeast Workshop on Southern Africa. Before her current position, she taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Thornberry actively welcomes applications from prospective graduate students interested in modern African history, law, gender, sexuality, and disability.
Research topics
- Political science
- Sociology
- Law
- Gender studies
- Criminology
Selected publications
African Studies Review · 2020-06-08
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingAn abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
PROCEDURE AS POLITICS IN THE CAPE COLONY: THE CAREER OF ANDREW GONTSHI, 1880–1904
The Journal of African History · 2020-11-01 · 10 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingAbstract In 1881, Andrew Gontshi became the first black law agent in the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope and thus South Africa's first black lawyer. Records of court cases argued by Gontshi and his fellow black law agents provide a rich new archive for understanding the political sensibilities of the nineteenth-century Eastern Cape, where Gontshi practiced law and participated in the development of new forms of political organization, as well as the meaning of law to black intellectuals. In both law and politics, Andrew Gontshi employed procedural tactics to hold the state accountable to its own formalities. In Gontshi's world, law provided not a source of justice but a set of tools that could be used to advance a political agenda. Gontshi's story thus prompts a reconsideration of law's place in the intellectual tradition of South Africa's liberation struggle.
The Problem of African Girlhood: Raising the Age of Consent in the Cape of Good Hope, 1893–1905
Law and History Review · 2020-02-01 · 2 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingIn 1893, legislation in the Cape Colony raised the age of consent to sexual intercourse from twelve to fourteen. Only twelve years later, however, did colonial administrators extend the law to the predominantly African districts in the eastern region of the colony. A reconstruction of the political debates surrounding the law, and its eventual extension, illuminates the relationship between understandings of childhood and race in the Cape. By the late 19th century, the comparison of Africans to children had become the governing metaphor for the “native question”; but this metaphor contained fundamental ambiguities. Debates over the age of consent forced Cape politicians to confront the racial and chronological boundaries of childhood innocence, and thus to articulate more precise theories of racial difference itself. Rural elites upheld a vision of hierarchy calibrated by wealth and social knowledge as well as race. Reformers sought to protect the innocence of white girls, in part to defend against racial degeneration, but disagreed over the inclusion of black girls. Meanwhile, even liberal social purity advocates hesitated to extend the law to the eastern districts, where “native law and custom” seemed not only to offer more protection but also to undermine claims of European superiority.
Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2018-12-03
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingCambridge University Press eBooks · 2018-12-03
paratext1st authorCorrespondingCambridge University Press eBooks · 2018-12-03
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingCambridge University Press eBooks · 2018-11-30 · 39 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingElizabeth Thornberry uses historical evidence to shed light on South Africa's contemporary epidemic of sexual violence. Drawing on over a thousand cases from a diverse set of courts, Thornberry reconstructs the history of rape in South Africa's Eastern Cape, from the precolonial era to the triumph of legal and sexual segregation, and digs deep into questions of conceptions of sexual consent. Through this process, Thornberry also demonstrates the political stakes of disputes over sexual consent, and the ways in which debates over the regulation of sexuality shaped both white and black politics in this period. From customary authority to missionary Christianity and humanitarian liberalism to segregationism, political claims implied theories of sexual consent, and enabled distinctive claims to control female sexuality. The political history of rape illuminates not only South Africa's contemporary crisis of sexual violence, but the entangled histories of law, sexuality, and politics across the globe.
Colonizing Consent : Rape and Governance in South Africa's Eastern Cape
2018-12-13 · 13 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingElizabeth Thornberry uses historical evidence to shed light on South Africa's contemporary epidemic of sexual violence. Drawing on over a thousand cases from a diverse set of courts, Thornberry reconstructs the history of rape in South Africa's Eastern Cape, from the precolonial era to the triumph of legal and sexual segregation, and digs deep into questions of conceptions of sexual consent. Through this process, Thornberry also demonstrates the political stakes of disputes over sexual consent, and the ways in which debates over the regulation of sexuality shaped both white and black politics in this period. From customary authority to missionary Christianity and humanitarian liberalism to segregationism, political claims implied theories of sexual consent, and enabled distinctive claims to control female sexuality. The political history of rape illuminates not only South Africa's contemporary crisis of sexual violence, but the entangled histories of law, sexuality, and politics across the globe.
Liberalism and the Colonial Law of Sexual Violence
Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2018-12-03
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingCambridge University Press eBooks · 2018-12-03
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 2 shared
Emily Burrill
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- 1 shared
Richard Roberts
- 1 shared
Richard G. Roberts
Wentworth Institute of Technology
Education
- 2011
Ph.D., History Department
Stanford University
Awards & honors
- Fulbright Institute of International Education
- American Council of Learned Societies
- Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University
- Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship (2024-2025)
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