Joseph M. H. Clark (NHC Fellow, 2024–25)

Joseph M. H. Clark is associate professor of history at the University of Kentucky. A social and cultural historian of the Early Modern Atlantic World, his work is situated at the intersections of commerce, climate, and African diaspora. His first book, Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2023), examined the Mexican port city of Veracruz, elaborating its material relationships with the Caribbean Islands and the impact of those relationships on the city’s Afro-descended population. His current book project is Witchcraft and Contraband in the Early Modern Caribbean. It examines the relationships between folk healing, spiritual practice, and informal trade in the Caribbean (ca. 1600–1640). The book is especially interested in how Caribbean people adapted the natural world into their spiritual and economic practices in the Early Modern period. In 2023–2024, Clark received the Outstanding Teacher Award in the College of Arts and Sciences at University of Kentucky, where he teaches courses on Latin American, Caribbean, and Atlantic History, as well as thematic and global courses on the histories of race, environment, and disaster.

Selected Publications

• Clark, Joseph M. H. “The Limit of Afro-Mexico: Archival Abundance and A Fragmented Diaspora.” In Afro-Mexico, edited by Theodore W. Cohen, and Nicole von Germeten. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming.
• Clark, Joseph M. H. “‘Born in this Abominable Sin’: Contraband Trade in Colonial Spanish America.” In Contraband Cultures: Reframing Smuggling across Latin America, edited by Charles Beach, and Jennifer Cearns. London: University College London Press, 2024. Forthcoming.
• Clark, Joseph M. H. Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
• Clark, Joseph M. H. “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.
• Clark, Joseph M. H. “Environment and the Politics of Relocation in the Caribbean Port of Veracruz, 1519–1599.” In Spain’s Maritime Empire: The Caribbean in the Long Sixteenth Century, edited by Ida Altman, and David Wheat, 189–210. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019.