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Matthew Pessar Joseph

                 Matthew Pessar Joseph

Mellon Assistant Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies


(he/him/his)


Email: matthew.joseph@vanderbilt.edu

615.343.6282

Office: Buttrick Hall 226

Office Hours: Wednesdays 11am-1pm

 

Education

  • BA – Yale University (Departmental Honors in History and Ethnicity, Race & Migration)
  • M.Phil  – Columbia University (History)
  • PhD – Columbia University (History)

Specializations

  • Twentieth-Century U.S. Racial, Cultural, and Urban History
  • Black Diasporic Music
  • The Caribbean and Greater Gulf Coast Region
  • Public History, Museum Studies, and Oral History

Biography

Matthew Pessar Joseph is the Mellon Assistant Professor in African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. He previously served as Purdue University's inaugural Post-Doctoral Fellow in Belonging, Equity, and Inclusion. A historian of race in twentieth-century America, Joseph received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2022.

Joseph's doctoral thesis, Syncopating Segregation: Musical Cross-Pollination in Post-World War II New York City, recently won the Urban History Association's Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation in Urban History and was a finalist for the Labor and Working-Class History Association's Herbert G. Gutman Prize for Outstanding Dissertation. In it, Joseph argues that by participating in diverse musical scenes, African American, Latinx, queer, and white residents of post-World War II New York City were able to transcend boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation at a time when scholars argue that Gotham became increasingly segregated.

Joseph has won write-up fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and the American Musicological Society, and grants from Columbia University, Case Western Reserve University, and the Society of American Music. The University of Illinois Press has solicited his dissertation manuscript for publication in their Black Studies and Labor Studies catalogues. His commitment to student mentorship has earned him Columbia's Graduate School of Arts & Sciences' Teaching Scholars Award and Purdue's Teaching Pillar Award in Global & Community Engagement.

Portfolio

  • Monograph (in progress): Gotham Under A Groove: Multiracial Music in Post-World War II New York City
  • “‘I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent’: Mixed-Race Doo-Wop, Gang Culture and the War Against Rock ’n’ Roll,” Journal of Urban History (forthcoming, Fall 2025)
  • “‘Our Buzzing Latin Cousins’: Afro-Latinxs, African Americans, and the Creation of a Black Transcultural Midtown Manhattan Musical Scene, 1933-1966,” Journal of American Ethnic History (forthcoming, Spring 2025)
  • “‘A Totally Integrated Club Scene’: ‘New York, New Music’ at the Museum of the City of New York,” The Brooklyn Rail (October 2021)
  • “A Sound as International as the City Itself: A Review of Benjamin Lapidus’ New York and the International Sound of Latin Music, 1940-1990,” Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History (2021)
  • Entry on New York City hip hop, St. James Encyclopedia of Hip Hop Culture (2018)
  • “‘Lords of Sounds:’ The Mutual Constitution of Slave Music by Masters and Slaves in the Antebellum South,” The Yale Historical Review (2011)