Tyesha Maddox

Tyesha Maddox is an Associate Professor at Fordham University in the Department of African and African American Studies. She received her Ph.D. in History from New York University in 2016. Her BA in History and Africana Studies and a MPS in Africana Studies both from Cornell University.

Her monograph A Home Away from Home Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity (University of Pennsylvania Press 2024) engages multiple historiographies, including those concerning Caribbean migration, immigration to the U.S., transnational history, women’s history, African American history, Caribbean history, and the historiography of social organizations in the United States. It examines the significance of Anglophone Caribbean mutual aid societies and benevolent associations in New York (1890–1940) and argues that participation in these organizations: played a vital role in the formation of transnational identities; facilitated in community building; and created transnational kinship networks that both empowered immigrants to form a collective “Caribbean” identity and unleashed a political activism among immigrants fighting alongside African Americans to ensure equality during the tumultuous era of American Jim Crow and grant access to economic opportunities that would ensure their future success.

In 2020, she co-edited a comprehensive resource guide and website titled "This is Not a Riot!" (www.notariot.com) to help contextualize the Black Lives Matter Uprisings of 2020 and place them in the historical radical tradition of Black protest in the US. She also serves as a key organizer for Mutual Aid NYC's Organizing Archive and Library as well as their Public History and Political Education Committee.

Before joining the faculty at Fordham University, she was the 2015-2016 African and African Diaspora Studies Dissertation Fellow at Boston College and the 2015-2016 Kate B. & Hall J. Peterson Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. In 2018, she was a Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Research Library in NYC as a Ford Foundation/Mellon Foundation Fellow. In 2019-2020, she was the Race and Gender Post-Doctoral Associate at Rutgers University.

Her research and teaching interests include the African Diaspora, Caribbean, Black Atlantic, Women and Gender, African American History, Race, Transnational Communities, Migrational Movements, Immigration, Black Identity Formation, Social and Cultural History.

"History of Caribbean Immigration to the U.S.", Fordham News, 2.8.18

Tyesha Maddox, PhD, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies, was awarded the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s Scholars-in-Residence Program Fellowship.4.24.17

"Fordham Welcomes New Faculty" Fordham News, 8.31.16