Dr Michael Joseph
I am a historian of the modern Caribbean, Britain, and France. I studied for my BA, MSc, and DPhil at Oxford, where I subsequently held a Junior Research Fellowship at Corpus Christi College, before arriving at Cambridge in 2021.
My work to date has largely focused on the Caribbean. My current book project is a comparative study of anti-colonial political thought in five islands – Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados, Martinique, and Guadeloupe – from the 1880s to the 1930s.
My published research has touched on issues of race, gender, labour, and politics in the early 20th-century Caribbean, focusing in particular on the First World War and its aftermath. One article won the French History Article Prize for 2021.
Alongside this work, I also have research interests in the history of the Caribbean diaspora in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in Black British and Black European Studies more broadly.
I co-convene the Modern British History research seminar and, together with colleagues and PhD students from Cambridge, Columbia, and NYU, participate in a regular reading group on 20th-century British history – NYCTC.
I would be delighted to hear from undergraduate/postgraduate students interested in writing dissertations on any aspect of modern Black British history, Black European history, and/or post-emancipation Caribbean history.
At the undergraduate level, I lecture and supervise for a number of modern British history papers. For IA, I co-convene O7: Modern Britain and Ireland, 1750 to the present with Peter Mandler; for IB, Sujit Sivasundaram, Peter Mandler, and I co-convene T12: British Worlds, 1750-1919.
At the postgraduate level, I teach on the MPhil in Modern British History, where I contribute to the core course on ‘Debates in Modern British History’ and convene an option course on ‘Modern Britain and the Caribbean’.