Dr. James G. Cantres is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, & Latino Studies at Hunter College and in the Department of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is a historian of the African diaspora whose work focuses on radical political formations spanning the Black Atlantic, migration, twentieth century upheavals within and across Black communities from the Caribbean to Britain, and patterns of African knowledge-making, resistance, and sovereignty in Africa, the Americas, and modern Europe.
He is the author of Blackening Britain: Caribbean Radicalism from Windrush to Decolonization (Rowman & Littlefield, December 2020), a study detailing the social and political histories of community formation, race consciousness, anti-imperialism, and radical intellectual and artistic activism among Caribbean subject-citizens in Britain following World War II and through the period of decolonization, independence, and radical political action across Africa and the Caribbean. His ongoing research investigates the emergence of Black Power politics and the growing influence of troublesome non-state actors, as radical resistors in the period immediately following independence across Black Atlantic societies including Jamaica, Trinidad, and decolonizing Britain.
His work has appeared in outlets including African and Black Diaspora, Public Books, Black Issues in Philosophy, and Global Hip Hop Studies. He received the Henry Wasser Award in recognition of Outstanding Scholarship from the CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences in 2021. He was a Co-Principal Investigator for the project "Black and Latinx Practices of Freedom: Methods, Archives, Pedagogies" (2022-2023), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's "Black Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative" (BRESI) at CUNY. He is an executive board member of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). Professor Cantres is on research leave for the 2023-24 academic year. Dr. Cantres's website can be found here: jamescantres.com.