Peniel E. Joseph is an American scholar, teacher, and leading public voice on race issues who holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Joseph joined UT Austin in 2015 from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where he had founded the school's Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD). He founded the second Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD) on the University of Texas campus in 2016, and is director of the center.