Josh Grace

Dr. Josh Grace (he/him/his) is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Academy of Transdisciplinary Studies. His work explores the intersection of technology and development in African history and aims to provide African-centered histories of both topics. His work has been supported by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Fulbright.

Grace’s first book, African Motors: Technology, Gender, and the History of Development in Tanzania (Duke University Press), was a finalist for the Bethwell A. Ogot Award for the African Studies Association (USA) in 2022. Rooted in hundreds of oral histories, his apprenticeship in an automobile repair shop in Dar es Salaam, and archives in East Africa and the United Kingdom, African Motors demonstrates that Africans have long shaped cultures of mobility, expertise, technology, and development. The book argues that this fact should reshape assumptions about which societies possess useful knowledge for pursuing economic development or more sustainable societies. 

He will shortly begin writing about the intersection of sports history and technological history. “Street Roots: Technology and the Beautiful Game,” begins with a core assumption about the relationship between soccer and streets: that multi-use, accessible streets played a central role developing the world’s best footballers. Or as Johan Cruyff put it, “When we were young, we could play in the street. You can’t play in the street anymore.” The book builds off this tension between ideas about good soccer and the closure of streets and other public spaces to explore the relationship between histories of open, accessible infrastructure and histories of play. The book will include material from the U.S., the U.K., and East Africa.

Grace is also currently co-editing (with Jennifer Hart) and contributing to the Bloomsbury Cultural History volume, A Cultural History of Transport and Mobility in the Age of Mass Mobility. Recognizing the technological changes that extended networks of mobility around the world after 1945, the book will make the case that transnational political movements against colonialism, apartheid, and segregation put the masses in mass mobility in ways that technological changes could not. 

Grace taught a variety of courses at the University of South Carolina classes from 2013 to 2025, including Introduction to African History, East Africa and the Indian Ocean World, and Africa Since 1800. He also created and taught, Sustainability in World History: From Early Times to the Anthropocene.