Dr. Peniel Joseph

Peniel E. Joseph is one of the nation’s leading scholars of African American history.  Although Joseph’s formal expertise includes the Black Radical Tradition, Pan-Africanism, Black Social Movements, and African American feminism, he is currently embarking on a re-evaluation of the Black Power Movement. Professor Joseph is associate professor of African and Afro-American Studies and affiliate faculty in history at Brandeis University. Joseph is the founder of a growing subfield of historical and Africana Studies scholarship that he has named “Black Power Studies.”  This new scholarship, which connects grassroots activism to national struggles for black self-determination and international African independence movements, is actively rewriting postwar African American history. 

Joseph's dynamic presentation style and innovative scholarship place him on the cutting edge of a new generation of public intellectuals. Black Power, he says, is a great teaching tool to introduce 21st century young people to the wonders of African American history, noting that, “there aren’t many more important, or controversial, figures as Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael.” But for Joseph, Black Power is more than just cinema verite; it provides an entrée into complex discussions of civil rights, feminism, the Cold War and postwar American history at the local, national, and international level.

Joseph’s book Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, was a Washington Post Book World Best Nonfiction Book for 2006. It was also a finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize; received honorable mention for the 2007 Gustavas Myers Center Outstanding Book Award; and received the inaugural W.E.B. Du Bois Book Award from the Northeastern Black Studies Alliance and was a Boston Globe paperback bestseller in 2008.  He is the editor of The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (2006). He is currently working on a biography of Civil Rights and Black Power activist Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and a study of postwar African American history.  Joseph is a frequent national commentator on civil rights, race, and democracy issues and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Chronicle Review, and the Washington Post. Dr. Joseph is the only scholar to be named a “Top Young Historian” by George Mason University’s History News Network and an “Emerging Scholar” by Diverse Issues in Higher Education. He has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Ford Foundation. For the 2008-2009 academic year, Dr. Joseph will be a fellow at Harvard University’s Warren Center.

Joseph is currently working on his next two major research projects Any Day Now: African American Historical Criticism analyzes postwar African American history through a series of essays that focuses on the interaction between iconic and unglamorous figures within postwar black freedom struggles and Stokely Carmichael and America in the 1960s, a political biography of the civil rights and Black Power activist. Both projects attest to the wide scope of Joseph’s historical research; a range that he attributes to the depth of African American history. “The discipline,” he says, “is as vast as your imagination allows it to be.”