Joshua Guild specializes in 20th- and 21st-century African American social and cultural history, urban history, and the making of the modern African diaspora, with particular interests in migration, black internationalism, black popular music, and the black radical tradition. A graduate of Wesleyan University, where he was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, he received his PhD in History and African American Studies from Yale. His research has been supported by fellowships and awards from a number of institutions, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. In 2012, he was a fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of African and African American Research.

Guild's first book, In the Shadows of the Metropolis: Cultural Politics and Black Communities in Postwar New York and London, will be published by Oxford University Press. The book examines African-American and Afro-Caribbean migration and community formation in central Brooklyn and west London from the 1930s through the 1970s. He has published essays on topics ranging from the pioneering Brooklyn politician Shirley Chisholm, the politics of calypso in the age of decolonization and civil rights, and black environmentalism in the Gulf South. His next book project, The City Lives in You: The Black Freedom Struggle and the Futures of New Orleans, focuses on struggles for racial and economic justice in New Orleans from the mid-20th century black freedom movement through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil disaster. With Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and other collaborators, he co-edited a special issue of the Journal of African American History on "The Black 1980s" (Summer 2023).

Professor Guild’s interests in digital humanities, new media, and public engagement are reflected in the 2014-15 African American Studies Faculty-Graduate Seminar that he organized, “Black Studies in the Digital Age.” He previously served on the Executive Committee of Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities. He is an Associated Faculty member in the Program in Urban Studies.