Tyesha Maddox
Tyesha Maddox is an Assistant Professor at Fordham University in the Department of African and African American Studies. She received her PhD in History from NYU in 2016. She is currently a 2017-2018 Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as a Ford Foundation/Mellon Foundation Fellow. She received a BA in History and Africana Studies and a MPS in Africana Studies both from Cornell 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.
Her current manuscript, "From Invisible to Immigrants: Political Activism and the Construction of Caribbean American Identity, 1890-1940," examines the significance of early twentieth century Anglophone Caribbean immigrant mutual aid societies and benevolent associations in New York. It explored how immigrant social organizations played a vital role in the formation of transnational identities and facilitated in community building, arguing that participation in these organizations created kinship networks that both empowered immigrants to form a collective “Caribbean” identity and unleashed a political activism among immigrants fighting alongside African Americans to insure their equality in the tumultuous era of American Jim Crow.
