Joe Clark

Associate Professor

I am a social and cultural historian of the early modern Atlantic world, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. I have thematic interests in African diaspora, contraband trade, and environment and climate.

I have two current book projects. One is titled Witchcraft and Contraband in the Early Modern Caribbean. It examines of the intersections of folk healing, spiritual practice, and informal trade in the Caribbean (ca. 1600-1640). I am especially interested in how Caribbean people adapted the natural world into their spiritual and economic practices. The other is titled The Many Lives of Pedro Angola: Captivity, Piracy, and Freedom in the Early Modern Caribbean and examines three cases of a man named Pedro Angola, first as the victim of a Dutch raid on Puerto Rico in 1625, then as a victim of the Inquisition in Cartagena in 1626, and finally as a member of the palenque of Límon Maroon community in 1633.

My first book, Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century, examined the Mexican port city of Veracruz. The book elaborates Veracruz's material relationships with the Caribbean Islands, demonstrating how exchanges of environment, goods, and people laid the groundwork for social and cultural institutions that, in turn, defined local concepts of race, caste, and ethnicity in coastal Mexico that differed significantly from those in the interior.

I teach courses on Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World from the early modern period to the present, as well as thematic and global courses on the histories of environment, empire, disaster, and race.

Contact Information

jmhclark@uky.edu

1757 Patterson Office Tower

(859) 257-1859

Education

PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 2016

Research Interests

Early Modern Atlantic World
Slavery and African Diaspora
Latin America and the Caribbean
Environmental History

Affiliations

History
Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies
African American and Africana Studies
Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies
Social Theory

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

Selected awards

Fellow, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC (2024)

Outstanding Teacher Award, College of Arts and Sciences (2023-2024)

Visiting Fellow, Eccles Centre for American Studies, The British Library, London, UK (2023)

Lewis Hanke Post-Doctoral Award, Conference on Latin American History (2019)

Mayer Fellow, The Huntington Library, Pasadena, CA (2018)

Lydia Cabrera Award, Conference on Latin American History (2012)

Selected Publications

Selected Publications:

“La conformación caribeña de Veracruz: Diáspora africana e intercambio regional en el siglo XVII,” translated by Álvaro Alcántara López, forthcoming 2026.

“The Limit of Afro-Mexico: Archival Abundance and A Fragmented Diaspora” in Coming Into View: Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Theodore W. Cohen and Nicole von Germeten, Cambridge University Press, 2025.

"'Born in this abominable sin': contraband trade in colonial Spanish America," in Contraband Cultures: Reframing smuggling across Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Jennifer Cearns and Charles Beach, chap. 1. London: University College London Press, 2024.

Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Honorable Mention, Bandelier/Lavrin Book Prize, Rocky Mountain Council of Latin American Studies

"The Moving Border: Black Experiences in Caribbean Frontiers and North American Borderlands in the Late Seventeenth Century," in At the Heart of the Borderlands: Africans and Afro-Descendants on the Edges of Colonial Spanish America, edited by Cameron D. Jones and Jay T. Harrison, 38-53. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2023.

"Environment and the Politics of Relocation in the Caribbean Port of Veracruz, 1519–1599," in The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century, edited by Ida Altman and David Wheat, 189-210. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019.