Joshua Aiken is an Assistant Professor of Law at Wayne State University.

Joshua is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research investigates how legal systems organize distributions of harm, vulnerability, protection, and safety in the context of U.S. empire. He works at the intersection of Black studies, criminal law and procedure, constitutional law, carceral studies, critical legal genealogies, feminist and social theory. His archival work is intertwined with question of law and policy related to policing, punishment, and surveillance.

From 2024-2026, he was the American Bar Foundation and Law and Society Association Doctoral Fellow in Law & Inequality. He is also a poet and Cave Canem Fellow.

Photo credit: Marcus Jackson

Joshua is currently working on a book project entitled The Armed Individual based on his dissertation research tracing the relationship between race, guns, law and American violence from 1960-2010. In 2026, his dissertation won the Edwin Small Prize for outstanding work in American History and a forthcoming journal article, as part of the same thread of research, entitled Reasoned Suspicion won the American Bar Foundation’s 2026 Robert Hetlage Prize.

Joshua received his Ph.D. in History and Black Studies with distinction, as well as his J.D. at Yale University. He also 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. As a poet he has been supported by Cave Canem, the deGroot Foundation, and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center. His poems have won the Martin Starkie Prize from Oxford University Poetry Society as selected by Jane Yeh, his chapbook to be in & of (2023), was selected by poet Chen Chen as the inaugural winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, and work can be found in publications like Boulevard, Copper Nickel, Muzzle, Pleiades and Sixth Finch.


Informed by critical legal genealogy, Black studies, critical race and social theory, and empirical legal scholarship, Aiken’s research agenda 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. Additionally, he examines criminalization and carceral settings as particular sites where LGBTQ+ youth, non-citizens, and people of color through are subjected to inequality, harm, and vulnerability through legal avenues.