Joseph Dorsey Photo

Joseph Dorsey
Professor of History, Comparative Literature, and Film Studies
Purdue University

 

Dr. Joseph Carroll Dorsey is an associate professor of history, comparative literature, and film studies in the History Department and the African American Studies Program at Purdue University. He also serves as the Director of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies in the latter program. He earned his B.A. at Morgan State University, his M.A. at Northwestern University, and a Ph.D. in Latin American history and Spanish and Portuguese literatures at the University of California.

Dr. Dorsey’s first book, Slave Traffic in the Age of Abolition: Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean, 1815-1859 (2003), was nominated for several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. His essays appear in such journals as: African American Studies, The Journal of Caribbean History, The Journal of Caribbean Studies, Latin American Perspectives, and Slavery and Abolition, as well as in anthologies edited by Hilary Beckles, Verene Shepherd, Linden Lewis, and Marta Moreno Vega. He also has several entries in the Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora, edited by Carole Boyce-Davies. He received the Lydia Cabrera Award for Research in Cuban Historical Studies for his ongoing study of Chinese contract labor in late nineteenth-century Cuba, won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was a finalist for a Guggenheim Research Fellowship in support of a biography in progress called, “A French Lady from Baltimore: Cultural Intersectionality in the Life and Times of Mère Marie-Thérèse Duchemin, 1810-1892.”

Dr. Dorsey is a member of the Caribbean Studies Association, the Latin American Studies Association, and the National Council for Black Studies. He has also served as a judge for such national grant and fellowship foundations as the TIAA-CREF Ruth Hamilton Award in African Diaspora Studies, the Lydia Cabrera Award for Research in Cuban Historical Studies, and the Fellowship Program for New Faculty, under the auspices of the American Counsel of Learned Societies.

 

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