James Cantres is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies at Hunter College. His book, Blackening Britain: Caribbean Radicalism from Windrush to Decolonization (Rowman & Littlefield International, December 2020) details the social and political histories of community formation, race consciousness, anti-imperialism, and the quandary of multiculturalism among West Indian migrants in London in the decades following World War II. Commonly known as the Windrush generation, these imperial citizens reshaped British metropolitan culture and politics in subsequent decades.

Professor Cantres explores the ways in which African diasporic art forms and popular culture—hip hop, reggae, sports, literature,  and the plastic arts—articulate belonging and unbelonging among black peoples in Britain through the period of decolonization and independence in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. He was recently named a 2021 CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences Henry Wasser Awardee for Outstanding Research.

He is a member of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, Caribbean Philosophical Society, and African-American Intellectual History Society and former Chair of the American Historical Association's Graduate and Early Career Committee (2017-20).

Previously, he was a Fellow of the CUNY Mellon Faculty Diversity Career Enhancement Initiative (CFDI), Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at New York University, and Black Studies Dissertation Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara.