Joshua Guild

Title
Associate Professor of History and African American Studies
Office Phone
Office
106 Morrison Hall
Office Hours

& by appointment

Bio/Description

Joshua Guild specializes in twentieth-century African American social and cultural history, urban history, and the making of the modern African diaspora, with particular interests in migration, black internationalism, black popular music, and the black radical tradition. A graduate of Wesleyan University, where he was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, he received his PhD in History and African American Studies from Yale. His research has been supported by fellowships and awards from a number of institutions, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. In 2012, he was a fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of African and African American Research.

Guild is currently completing a book, In the Shadows of the Metropolis: Cultural Politics and Black Communities in Postwar New York and London, which will be published by Oxford University Press. The book examines African-American and Afro-Caribbean migration and community formation in central Brooklyn and west London from the 1930s through the 1970s. He has published or has forthcoming essays on topics ranging from the pioneering Brooklyn politician Shirley Chisholm, the politics of calypso in the age of decolonization and civil rights, and Black Power in diasporic perspective. His next book project, tentatively entitled The City Lives in You: The Black Freedom Struggle and the Futures of New Orleans, will focus on struggles for racial and economic justice in New Orleans from the mid-20th century black freedom movement through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil disaster.

Professor Guild’s interests in digital humanities, new media, and public engagement are reflected in the African American Studies Faculty-Graduate Seminar that he organized in 2014-15, “Black Studies in the Digital Age.” He previously served on the Executive Committee of Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities. He is also an Associated Faculty member in the Program in Urban Studies.

Teaching Interests

Professor Guild teaches courses on African American history, the civil rights era, memory and history, urban history, and the making of the modern African diaspora.

Selected Articles and Chapters

"Malik Rahim's Black Radical Environmentalism," Southern Cultures 27:1 "Human/Nature" issue (Spring 2021).

"If They Take You in the Morning, They Will Be Coming for Us That Night," Africa Is a Country (January 2017).

“'Nobody in This World Is Better Than Us': Calypso in the Age of Decolonization and Civil Rights,” in The Other Special Relationship: Race and Rights in Britain and America, Robin D.G. Kelley and Stephen Tuck, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

"To Make That Someday Come: Shirley Chisholm's Radical Politics of Possibility," in Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, eds. (New York University Press, 2009).

Work In Progress

Co-editor, special issue of the Journal of African American History on "The Black 1980s" (Summer 2023).

Advisee(s):
Area of Interest
(In alphabetical order)
African American
Global
Immigration & Migration
Urban History
Home Department & Other Affiliations
African American Studies
History
Period
20th Century
Region
North America
United States