Matthew Joseph

Mellon Assistant Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies

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 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 labor studies and Black 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.