Guy Emerson Mount

Bio

Guy Emerson Mount is an assistant professor of History at Wake Forest University as well as an affiliate faculty member in the program of African American Studies. His award-winning research focuses on the intersection of Black transnationalism, Western modernity, and global empires. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2018 where he also served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Social Sciences. Prior to joining the faculty at Wake Forest University he also taught at Auburn University from 2018-2022 and for the 2023-2025 academic years, he was also awarded a fellowship at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia.

Professor Mount’s research interests include the African Diaspora, slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, colonialism, American empire, the Atlantic World, racial capitalism, critical mixed race studies, Afro-Asian solidarities, peace studies, and radical Black politics. Additionally, he has been at the forefront of advancing a new field of inquiry coalescing under the moniker of the Black Pacific—a liminal site of global Blackness where alternate formations of race, empire, and self-invention were re-imagined and contested alongside older notions established in the circuits of the Black Atlantic. Methodologically this work spans the fields of cultural, social, political, and intellectual history. His current book project is a global history of emancipation told through the lived realities of transnational Black workers who jettisoned the Atlantic World for a new life in the Pacific. Tentatively titled Black Elsewheres: Slavery, Empire, and Reconstruction in the Black Pacific, this project revisits the older historiographical debates surrounding American Reconstruction through an entirely new set of transnational archival sources. Collectively, these sources reveal concrete plans after emancipation for a massive state-funded colonization program that promised to relocate over five million formerly enslaved peoples from the Atlantic World to America’s nascent empire in Hawaii and the Philippines. By following the lives of ordinary black teachers, chefs, artists, and sharecroppers as they migrated and attempted to enact this program, Mount’s book promises to unveil the largely overlooked connections between the death of legalized American slavery and the birth of American overseas empire.

As part of his research into the lasting legacies of slavery, Professor Mount co-founded the scholarly team that uncovered the University of Chicago’s historical ties to slavery and began collaborating with community preservationists, genealogists, and activists on the South Side of Chicago organizing for reparations. That team, The Reparations at UChicago Working Group (RAUC), has continued to work on theorizing reparations as an ongoing praxis in conversation with practitioners around the world.  While at Auburn University he was an active supporter of the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project and a co-founder of the short-lived Alabama Center for Transformative Justice which was a collaboration between Auburn University and Tuskegee University to address the region’s current legacy of slavery and antiblackness. His second book project, tentatively titled “Reparations: A Global History of Justice”  will trace the genealogy of reparations struggles globally from indigenous technologies of justice making to the rise of international socialism/anarchism to our present moment where a number of new/old reparative practices appear to be on the ascent. In the fields of public history and the digital humanities, Mount previously served as an editor for Black Perspectives, the world’s largest online destination for African American history.

Professor Mount’s work has earned him numerous honors and awards including recognition from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Foundation, and the American Historical Association. At Auburn University he was awarded the 2022 Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award for his teaching and mentorship. His 2024 article, “Shall I Go: Black Colonization Plans to the Pacific, 1840-1914,” won the Richards Prize from the Society of Civil War Historians for the best article published that year in the Journal of the Civil War Era. He travels widely and has given invited addresses at Harvard, Oxford, Tuskegee, Cambridge, Penn, the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines among others. He welcomes inquiries from prospective students and media outlets.

Background

Education

PhD, University of Chicago

MA, University of Chicago

MA, San Diego State University

Academic Appointments

Wake Forest University. Assistant Professor 2022 – Present