Matthew Randolph (he/him/his)

Matthew (Matt) Alexander Randolph is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies in the Department of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. After graduating with a BA in History and Spanish at Amherst College, Matt received MA and PhD degrees in History from Stanford University, where he served as a graduate fellow for the Department of African & African American Studies and traveled to France as an exchange student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. As an interdisciplinary scholar of the African diaspora, he approaches the study and teaching of race and ethnicity through transnational perspectives and cross-cultural encounters. His multilingual and inter-imperial scholarship investigates Black life through both slavery and freedom, and across the geographies of the Atlantic World in the wake of the Haitian Revolution.

Building on his dissertation (Harboring Freedom: African American Migration and Imperial Rivalries in Samaná Bay, 1822-1871), Matt’s book manuscript is a study of the transplantation and transformation of Black identity that took place as part of nineteenth-century Haitian emigration initiatives. In the pursuit of citizenship and prosperity otherwise unimaginable in the antebellum United States, African American migrants relocated to Haiti and (re)created a sense of home as stewards of the land and water of the Samaná peninsula (in what is now the Dominican Republic). The book promises to bridge traditional historical methods with the critical eye of Black Studies toward archival analysis. This research engages with and contributes to several fields and discourses, including Black Geographies/Ecologies, Caribbean Studies, Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, and Afrofuturism. 

Building on parallel engagements with Black Atlantic and Afro-European studies, Matt is currently envisioning a second project, Black Oslo: A Study of Race and Rights from Scandinavia to Seattle, inspired by his family history and autoethnographic experiences. This in-progress study explores questions of race and rights in the Norwegian past, present, and future through transatlantic and maritime lenses. In addition, Matt has ongoing interests in the crossroads of race and nation during Parisian world’s fairs; the U.S. Civil Rights and Black Power movements; human rights history; and the global travels of Frederick Douglass.

Matt’s scholarship has been supported by a 2022 Fulbright grant for the Dominican Republic, which complemented travel to archives across the United States, France, and Spain. He has presented his research beyond the United States at conferences in several countries, including the Dominican Republic, Martinique, and Senegal. In 2025, he received the Du Bois-Wells Graduate Student Paper Prize from AAIHS (African American Intellectual History Society) for his conference paper, “Migrating Mariners: African American Emigration, Maritime Poetics, and the Afterlives of Slavery on Caribbean Shores.”