Room: NW 810
Phone: 0121 204 3712
Email: [email protected]

Joseph joined Aston as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Modern History at the beginning of the 2018/19 academic year. Before this, he was a postdoctoral associate at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and a Lecturer in History at Yale University. He also served as a Perkins Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University, affiliated with the Princeton Humanities Council and the Center for Digital Humanities. Prior to his arrival in the UK, he designed and taught courses on digital and transnational history at a number of universities in the United States.

Joseph’s main fields of interest are slavery and abolition, with a special focus on America, West Africa, and the wider world during the nineteenth century. Other areas of interest include political and social movements, missionaries and religion, capitalism and globalisation, and transnational histories of the United States. He is also interested in digital scholarship and has developed several public projects, most recently Princeton & Slavery. More information can be found on his blog.

Currently, Joseph is completing a book about the Mendi Mission and the role of Africa in the American abolition of slavery. Established in the wake of the Amistad revolt, the mission was a transatlantic extension of the Underground Railroad and a key site of action and imagination in the global contest over chattel slavery. He is also developing new digital projects, including an interactive, comparative database of runaway advertisements and projects using virtual reality to research, communicate, and teach about the past.

He invites students, members of the media and the public to contact him about any of these topics.

Digital Humanities Research Group

Decolonising the Curriculum Working Group

Placements Director for History

LQ1005 Making Histories I: Methods, Theories, Controversies

LQ2008 Making Histories II

LQ2010 The Atlantic World: Slavery and Emancipation

LQ3001 Research Dissertation

LQ3006 Teaching History in the 21st Century

Americans beyond the Americas

Antislavery Early Research Association

The Fugitive Digital

Seeking the Pioneers: Race History Detectives

World War I in South Africa: Digital and Virtual Experiences