Joe is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work considers the intersections between race, politics, popular culture, and physical space in the late twentieth century, with a particular focus on the San Francisco Bay Area between the 1960s and the 2010s. His work has analysed African American radicalism, Silicon Valley ideology, and Bay Area literature, cinema, and popular culture. He is currently thinking about the relationship between public space and racial politics in the Bay Area. The first fruits of this project appeared as an article that revealed the racial subtexts in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, one of the most famous works of the great science fiction writer and Bay Area native, Philip K. Dick.
This long-term project follows the publication of two major monographs. Black Revolutionaries: A History of the Black Panther Party was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2024. A major reinterpretation of the BPP, Black Revolutionaries emerged from Joe's long-standing interest in African American radicalism and follows the publication of a series of scholarly articles that included Joe's evaluation of the historiography of the BPP, the impact of prison and solitary confinement on the BPP founder Huey P. Newton, and the BPP’s campaign to free Newton. A year earlier, Joe published an interdisciplinary study of Hollywood's representation of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) uncovers how a series of supposedly unconnected films such as Venom, The Social Network, and The Internship articulate Hollywood fears about the potential for Silicon Valley corporations to redefine and dominate our world.
Joe has also published work on the representation of San Francisco in Clint Eastwood’s 1971 movie, Dirty Harry. This was expanded into Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan and the Conservative Backlash (University Press of Florida, 2016), a study of the relationship between the Dirty Harry series and conservative politics in the 1970s and 1980s, which highlights the parallels between the political message of the movies and the political rhetoric of conservative leaders such as Ronald Reagan. Described as 'the last word on Dirty Harry' it is an ideal present for the Eastwood fan in your life.
Earlier in his career, Joe was one of a number of British scholars who reconsidered the influence of the African American struggle on racial politics in the UK during the 1960s. He published groundbreaking evaluations of Malcolm X’s impact on racial politics in the West Midlands and the significance of African American soul music on British youth in the 1960s. This led to further study of Dave Godin, a legendary figure in the British soul scene.
Delving further back in time, Joe’s first monograph, The Culture War in the Civil Rights Movement (University Press of Florida, 2007) revealed the impact of cultural forms such as theater and music on the African American civil rights movement during the 1960s. From the singing workshops of the Highlander Folk School to the Black Panther Party’s Ministry for Culture it argued that ‘cultural organizing’ was central to the civil right movement’s operation.
