Joshua L. Crutchfield

Joshua L. Crutchfield is a scholar of 20th-century Black freedom movements, intellectual history and carceral studies. He is a Ph.D. student in the African and African Diaspora Studies department at the University of Texas at Austin where he’s working on his dissertation project titled, “Imprisoned Black Women Intellectuals: Mae Mallory, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur and Safiya Bukhari and the Struggle for Abolition, 1961-1890.” Crutchfield’s scholarship has appeared in The Black Scholar and in the African American Intellectual Historical Society’s award-winning blog “Black Perspectives.” Crutchfield is also a budding digital humanist. In 2015, he co-founded #BlkTwitterstorians, a digital humanities project that connects, supports, and affirms the scholarship of Black historians and academics on Twitter. He’s also is also working on digital humanities paper titled, “Text Mining The Abolitionist: Critical Resistance, Counter-Hegemonic Definitions, and Building the Case for Abolition,” that employs digital methods to visualize how prison abolitionists use language when making abolitionist arguments. Crutchfield’s community activism drives his scholarship. In 2015, Crutchfield co-founded Black Lives Matter Nashville, a community-based group that organizes to end state-sanctioned violence against black people in Nashville. Crutchfield currently resides in Austin, TX with his partner Tiffany and chihuahua Tinkerbell.