Photo credit: Marcus Jackson

Working at the intersection of legal history, Black studies, critical race and social theory, and empirical legal scholarship, Aiken’s work examines the constitutive relationship between law and violence — not violence as an exception to legal order, but as its ordinary mechanism. His scholarship demonstrates how ostensibly race-neutral legal institutions combine to produce racialized distributions of harm without requiring explicit racial intent, and how the legal categories of safety, danger, injury, and remedy operate as a structured marketplace through which certain populations absorb harm so that protection can be delivered to others. He is currently working on a book project entitled, The Armed Individual, tracing the relationship between race, guns, law and American violence from 1960-2005.

Joshua received his Ph.D. in History and Black Studies, as well as his J.D. at Yale University. He is currently a Doctoral Fellow in Law & Inequality at the American Bar Foundation, holds Masters’ degrees in History and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis. He is an accomplished poet, a Cave Canem Fellow, Resident at the Vermont Studio Center, and winner of the Martin Starkie Prize. His chapbook, to be in & of (2023), was selected as the inaugural winner of the Palette Poetry Chapbook Prize.