JOSHUA AIKEN

Photo credit: Marcus Jackson

Joshua Aiken is a poet, educator and scholar focused on the history of race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, criminalization, distributions of harm, and the rule of law in the context of U.S. settler empire. Joshua is a Doctoral Fellow of Law & Inequality at the American Bar Foundation (2024-2026) and his dissertation, prospectively titled The Armed Individual, examines the relationship between racial domination, political economy, gun laws, and violence embedded in American life since the formal end of Jim Crow. With the support of the Steven Esposito Scholarship from the Point Foundation, Joshua received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 2024 and is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African-American Studies, also at Yale.

His broader research and teaching areas include critical legal genealogies of 20th- and 21st-century liberal ‘democracies’, race and the law, black radical thought, racial capitalism, black feminisms, displacement and state formation, the carceral state, history and law of policing and incarceration, TWAIL (third world approaches to international law), race, migration, and state power, critical race theory, law and the humanities, criminalization of queer and trans life, and punishments facilitated by non-criminal law (ranging from social welfare, public housing policy, deportations, and collateral consequences of criminal convictions). He is currently working on a project focused on how contemporary authoritarian, anti-black, and xenophobic politics have been shaped by understandings of social difference in the ‘long 1990s’ in the U.S. He is also working on a law-policy-genealogical examination of policing, surveillance technologies, racial geography and guns in the black belt and urban midwest since the 1970s.

A Cave Canem Fellow, de Groot Foundation grantee, and Vermont Studio Center resident, Joshua is also an accomplished poet. His poetry chapbook, to be in & of won the 2023 Palette Poetry Prize as selected by poet Chen Chen.Joshua holds graduate degrees in Forced Migration Studies and U.S. History from the University of Oxford where his research focused on race, political economy, displacement, and state-sponsored violence in the Americas in the 20th century. He was the Researcher-in-Residence for Artspace New Haven’s 2020 exhibition on the local chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. His writing and poetry can be found in publications like Apogee Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, Copper Nickel, Sixth Finch, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and the Winter Tangerine Review. He recently finished teaching a course on poetics and citizenship through the Yale Prison Education Initiative. 

to be in & of

Winner of the 2022 Palette Poetry Chapbook Prize, his debut chapbook to be in & of was released in August 2023.

The chapbook is available for purchase from: Bookshop (support independent bookstores!), Possible Futures (Josh’s favorite New Haven independent bookspace!), Barnes & Nobles, and Amazon.