Princeton University

Joshua B. Guild is an assistant professor who specializes in 20th Century African-American history and has focused on urban communities and the making of modern African- American diaspora.  Professor Guild’s dissertation compared African-American and Caribbean migration and politics in the formation of two black communities in post-World War II New York and London. He is currently working on a book based on his dissertation. He joined the faculty of the Department of History and the Center for African American Studies in the fall of 2006.

Professor Guild is a native of Boston and received a Ph.D. from Yale University in African-American Studies and History and a B.A. from Wesleyan University where he graduated with honors. He has received several fellowships and awards including a Fox International Fellowship that enabled him to study at Cambridge University in 2003 and a Chavez/Eastman/Marshall Dissertation Fellowship at Dartmouth College from 2005 to 2006. He also received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Professor Guild is currently working on his book comparing black communities in central Brooklyn, where there were large numbers of Caribbean immigrants interacting with African-Americans, to the Notting Hill area of London where there was an influx of Caribbean immigrants interacting with native Britons. The book will focus on the evolution of these communities against the backdrop of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, issues of police brutality and racism, and the role of Caribbean carnival in both cities.

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

“Metropolitan migrations, diasporic spaces, and the black world remade,” in Maroon: The Yale Journal of African-American Studies (May 2006).

Review. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America (NYU Press) in North Carolina Historical Review, (April 2006).

Works In Progress:
Article: "To Make That Someday Come: Shirley Chisholm's Radical Politics of Possibility" (forthcoming)

Article: "Imagining New Orleans" (with Andrew Horowitz; under review)