Peniel Emmaus Joseph

Peniel Emmaus Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, and Distinguished Service Leadership Professor and professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His research, teaching, and writing reside at the intersection of race, democracy, civil, and human rights at the local, national, and global levels. He is an internationally recognized scholar, author, speaker, and editor of seven award-winning books, most recently The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century (Basic Books, 2022). In 2022 he was named the grand prize winner of the Hamilton Book Award, the University of Texas at Austin’s highest research honor, for his book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr (Basic Books, 2020). This book served as the inspiration for the award-winning eight-part National Geographic series, “MLK/X.” Joseph frequently comments on race, civil rights, and democracy in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and is a contributor to NPR, C-SPAN, CNN, and the PBS NewsHour on issues related to American history and democracy.

Joseph’s project, “The Fire This Time: James Baldwin’s 1963 and America’s Civil Rights Revolution,” offers a new interpretation of one of the most critical years in postwar American history. The book reimagines the scope and breadth of the political, cultural, social, and economic systems and forces that shaped 1963’s national and global civil rights landscape through the eyes of James Baldwin’s art and activism.