Guy Emerson Mount is an assistant professor of American History and African American Studies at Wake Forest University focusing 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. He joined the faculty at Wake Forest University after previously teaching at Auburn University.

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 From Slavery to Empire: 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 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 a 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 an Idea”  will trace the genealogy of reparations struggles globally from ingenious 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 currently serves as an editor for Black Perspectives, the world’s largest online destination for African American history. With the support of the departments of History and African American Studies at Wake he is now developing a new podcast and video channel—called Black Thoughts Matter—on behalf of Black Perspectives and the African American Intellectual History Society.

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. 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 and can be followed on Twitter.

PhD, University of Chicago
MA, University of Chicago
MA, San Diego State University
BA, University of California at San Diego

World History
African American History
Nineteenth Century America
American Empire
A Global History of Reparations
Race and Sports
A Global History of Hip Hop
Historical Methods

Journal Articles (peer reviewed)

2023 “Transpacific History and the American South” (guest editor/contributor, special edition Journal of American-East Asian Relations)

2021 “Virginia in the Pacific: Slavery, Empire, and the Colonial Design of American Education” (accepted at the Journal of African American History)

2018 “’A Disgrace to All Slaveholders’: The University of Chicago’s Founding Ties to Slavery and the National Path to Reparations” in the Journal of African American History (Vol. 103, No. 1-2, Winter/Spring 2018), co-authors Caine Jordan and Kai Perry Parker

Chapters in Edited Volumes (peer reviewed)

2018 “Historical Ventriloquy: Black Thought and Sexual Politics in the Interracial Marriage of Frederick Douglass” in New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition, Christopher Cameron, Ashley Farmer, and Keisha Blain, eds. (Northwestern University Press)

2013 “A Troubled Modernity: W.E.B Du Bois, ‘The Black Church,’ and the Problem of Causality,” in ‘Abdu’l Baha’s Journey West: The Course of Human Solidarity, Negar Mottahedeh, ed. (Palgrave Macmillan)

Select Online Essays

2019 “Towards an AntifascistPedagogy,” Black Perspectives (June 18, 2019)

“Atlantic to Pacific:Jeremiah Martin’s Journey from Slavery to Freedom in Honua‘ino, Hawai‘i,” Palaka & Patch: A Historical Publication of the Kona Historical Society (Summer 2019)

2018 “Death and Memory from Mississippito Chicago,” Black Perspectives (March 13, 2018)

2017 “CanReparations Save American Politics?,” Black Perspectives (June 29, 2017)

“BlackRage at the Organization of American Historians,” Process for the Organization of American Historians (May, 10, 2017)

2016 “Why #BankBlack is Betraying the Black Freedom Struggle,” Black Perspectives (August 30, 2016)

“Is Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome Stamped from the Beginning?,” Black Perspectives (June 28, 2016)

“Postcoloniality from the Edges: Black Culture at the Philippine Military Academy,” Black Perspectives (March 28, 2016)

2015  “When Slaves Go on Strike:W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction 80 Years Later,” Black Perspectives (December 28, 2015)

“Capitalism and Slavery: Reflections on the Williams Thesis,” Black Perspectives (November 21, 2015)

 “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Black. Intellectual. Historian,” Black Perspectives (August 31, 2015)

 “Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Brooks, and TheMaster Narrative Of American History,” Black Perspectives (July 25, 2015)