Valerie Joseph, PhD is the Achieving Excellence in Math, Engineering and Science (AEMES) Mentoring Administrative Director at Smith College, managing programs that support students pursuing study in STEM fields, especially students from underrepresented and marginalized populations.  

A meaningful part of her position involves coaching students as some confront stressors of re/racialization shock, imposter syndrome and stereotype threat. These last phenomena rear their ugly heads in a stressful academic context in which some students experience wide disparities in wealth and cultural capital. 

Joseph holds a Masters degree in Movement Therapy with a concentration in counseling psychology from Antioch University New England, and Masters degrees in Social Justice Education and in Cultural Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Joseph also trained in mediation and negotiation at Columbia University and Harvard University, respectively. Dr. Valerie Joseph earned her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where her research focused on the legacies of British colonialism and African heritage memory among the members of the African diaspora in Grenada, and resulted in the dissertation, An Ethnography of African Diasporic Affiliation and Disaffiliation in Carriacou: How Anglo-Caribbean Preadolescent Girls Express Attachments to Africa. 

Informed by her career as a movement therapist, mediator, social justice educator and anthropologist, Joseph expanded into writing children’s books. Published in 2023, Dr. Valerie Joseph’s first children’s book, This is What Maisie Believes, situates a little Black girl in a conversation about her relationship to her Blackness via her relationship with God.