About Me

Joshua L. Crutchfield is a scholar specializing in 20th-century Black freedom movements, intellectual history, and carceral studies. He is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern University, where he is developing his manuscript, Imprisoned Black Women Intellectuals: Mae Mallory, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Safiya Bukhari, and the Black Power Seeds of Abolition.

Crutchfield’s scholarship has been featured in The Journal of African American History, The Black Scholar, Ethnic and Third World Review of Books, The Austin Chronicle, and the African American Intellectual Historical Society’s award-winning blog, Black Perspectives.

An emerging digital humanist, Crutchfield co-founded #BlkTwitterstorians in 2015 with Aleia Brown, a digital humanities project that connects and supports Black historians and academics on Twitter. His research also incorporates digital 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 language of prison abolitionists.

Crutchfield’s community activism deeply informs his scholarship. In 2015, he co-founded Black Lives Matter Nashville, a grassroots organization committed to ending state-sanctioned violence against Black people in Nashville.

In 2021, Crutchfield was awarded the inaugural UT-Austin Fellowship by the Harry Ransom Center and joined Black Perspectives as an assistant editor. In 2022, his research was supported by the Carrie Chapman Center for Women in Politics. Most recently, in 2024, he earned 2nd Place in the Graduate Association for African American History’s Memphis State Eight Paper Prize and was honored as a Dean’s Distinguished Graduate by the University of Texas College of Liberal Arts.