Peniel E. Joseph

Peniel E. Joseph (born 1973) is an American historian, founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University. He is the founder of the "Black Power Studies" subfield of American History and American Civil Rights History. He is a frequent commentator on CSPAN, NPR, and PBS's NewsHour. He has also appeared on NBC's Morning Joe, and the Colbert Report. He is the recipient of a number of fellowships, and most recently at the Hutchins Center at the W.E.B. du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University.

Joseph has served on the faculties of the University of Rhode Island, SUNY—Stony Brook, and Brandeis University. In 2009, together with ASU Foundation Professor Matthew C. Whitaker at Arizona State University, Joseph founded the Barack Obama Conference on American Democracy (BOAD), this spring celebrating its fifth year. In the fall of 2013, he founded the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD) at Tufts University. Currently, Joseph is the director of the CSRD and a Professor of History at Tufts. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Early years

Joseph was born and raised in New York. His mother, a Haitian immigrant to the United States, was a major influence on his current work. Because of her, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and other like leaders were household names during Joseph's upbringing. Also because of her, he was raised speaking and remains fluent in Haitian Creole.

Joseph finished high school at age 16, and attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Africana Studies and European History. He received a Ph. D. from Temple University in 2000 with a thesis titled "Waiting 'till the midnight hour : black political and intellectual radicalism, 1960-1975"

Publications

• Waiting 'til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York: Henry Holt and Co, 2006. According to WorldCat, the book is held in 1530 libraries. It was reviewed in The American Historical Review, Journal of African American History Contemporary Sociology,
• Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama. New York, NY: BasicCivitas Books, 2010. According to WorldCat, held in 1120 libraries
• Stokely: A Life. , 2014. (a biography of Stokely Carmichael.)
• The Black power movement : rethinking the civil rights-Black power era New York : Routledge, 2006. Reviewed in Journal of American History
• Neighborhood rebels : Black power at the local level New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.