Assistant Professor Philip Janzen is a historian of race and migration between Africa and the Caribbean. He received his Ph.D. in African history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018 and joined the University of Florida in 2019.
Janzen is currently working on a book about people from the Caribbean who joined the British and French colonial administrations in West and Central Africa. Forced to reckon with the profound effects of assimilation, racism, and dislocation, Caribbean administrators began to rethink their positions in the British and French empires. Many also learned African languages and engaged with African intellectuals to create new geographies of belonging across the fault lines of the Atlantic. The book experiments with a range of narrative forms and draws on the poetics of Aimé Césaire and Kamau Brathwaite to analyze a unique, transatlantic archive. It will be published by Duke University Press in June 2025.
Janzen’s work has appeared in the American Historical Review, The Journal of African History, the Journal of Social History, The Americas: A Quarterly Journal of Latin American History, The Canadian Journal of African Studies, and Africa is a Country. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Janzen teaches courses on African and world history.