Assistant Professor Philip Janzen studies the cultural and intellectual histories linking 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 recently completed a book titled An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging between Africa and the Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2025). The book is 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.
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.
Recent Publications
An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging between Africa and the Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2025).
“Glimpses of Haiti in West Africa,” Journal of Social History 58, no. 2 (Winter 2024): 291-312.
“Tension on the Railways: West Indians, Colonial Hierarchies, and the Language of Racial Unity in West Africa,” Journal of African History 64, no. 3 (November 2023): 388-405.
“Linga’s Dream? Interpreters, Entextualization, and Knowledge Production in Central Africa,” American Historical Review 127, no. 2 (June 2022): 755-785.
“‘Looking Forward Always to Africa’: William George Emanuel and the Politics of Repatriation in Cuba, 1894–1906,” The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History 78, no. 1 (2021): 37-59.