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Derek Catsam is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, where he teaches Modern United States history and Modern African history with an emphasis on race, politics, and social movements. He engages in research and writes in both Modern United States and Modern South African history, striking a balance between both areas despite the tendency of the academy to distrust those who cast their scholarly net widely but also seek depth. He is the author of "Freedom's Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides" (Kentucky: 2009) and "Bleeding Red: A Red Sox Fan's Diary of the 2004 Season" and is currently at work on manuscripts on bus boycotts in the US and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s, the Ole Miss integration crisis, and South Africa in the 1980s.
Derek was born and raised in Newport, New Hampshire, a small mill town about 45 minutes south of Hanover and Dartmouth College, and 45 minutes north of Concord. Derek was active in music and sports which helped gain him admission to Williams College where, in addition to double-majoring in history and political science, he was captain of the Williams track and field team and he sang with the Williams Octet. After a year, Derek (wisely) turned his back on his initial plan to go to law school, and instead he began an MA program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he wrote an MA thesis on the Integration of Ole Miss under the guidance of David Goldfield. In the fall of 1996 he began his PhD program in American history at Ohio University, where he was in the Contemporary History Institute. However, earlier that year he won a Rotary International postgraduate fellowship to spend 1997 at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. During that year he began an extensive project on the role of the security forces in undermining the anti-Apartheid struggle in the Eastern Cape in the 1980s.
In 1998 Derek returned to Athens where he continued with his PhD work, combining his American work with continued research interest in Africa. After two years on dissertation fellowships in Washington, DC, he finished his dissertation, “‘A Brave and Wonderful Thing’: The Freedom Rides and the Integration of Interstate Transport, 1941-1965,” which eventually turned into "Freedom's Main Line." He received his PhD from Ohio in 2003. In August 2002 he began a tenure-track assistant professorship at Minnesota State, Mankato. In 2003 he was awarded a fellowship from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies which sent him and a group of fellows to Israel to do anti-terrorism work. He has also led high school students to do community service and peace work in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and he has returned to Africa to research and travel extensively. He has received research fellowships from the Virginia Historical Society, the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina, the American Political Science Association, and the Deep South Regional Humanities Center at Tulane. In the spring of 2004 he was a research and writing fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville. Derek moved to west Texas in the summer of 2004.
Derek lives with his wife, Ana (who is a native Texan and also a history professor) in Odessa. He continues to root for Boston sports teams as well as the Springboks, Bafana Bafana, and the Proteas.
He is honored to be a member of the Safundi editorial board.
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Safundi
c/o Andrew Offenburger
Department of History
Yale University
P.O. Box 208324
New Haven, CT 06520-8324
Safundi Book Reviews
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