About Joshua L. Crutchfield

Joshua L. Crutchfield is a historian of twentieth-century Black freedom movements, Black intellectual history, and carceral studies. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern University, where he is developing his first book, Imprisoned Black Women Intellectuals: Mae Mallory, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Safiya Bukhari, and the Black Power Seeds of Abolition. The manuscript explores how imprisoned Black women activists theorized and advanced early abolitionist frameworks during and after the height of the Black Power era.

His scholarship has appeared in The Carryall, The Journal of African American History, The Black Scholar, Ethnic and Third World Review of Books, The Austin Chronicle, and the award-winning blog Black Perspectives, hosted by the African American Intellectual Historical Society.

An emerging digital humanist, Crutchfield is the co-founder (with Aleia Brown) of #BlkTwitterstorians, a digital project launched in 2015 to connect and amplify Black historians and scholars across social media. His work also integrates digital humanities methods, as seen in his paper, “Text Mining The Abolitionist: Critical Resistance, Counter-Hegemonic Definitions, and Building the Case for Abolition,” which uses data visualization to analyze the rhetorical strategies of prison abolitionists.

Crutchfield’s community activism is deeply interwoven with his scholarship. In 2015, he co-founded Black Lives Matter Nashville, a grassroots organization working to end state-sanctioned violence against Black communities in Middle Tennessee.

He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and honors, including the inaugural UT-Austin Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center (2021), support from the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics (2022), and the Graduate Association for African American History’s Memphis State Eight Paper Prize (2nd Place, 2024). That same year, he was named a Dean’s Distinguished Graduate by the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

He lives in Chicago with his wife Tiffany and dog Maudie, where he continues his research, teaching, and community engagement.