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9. Justin F. Jackson

Justin F. Jackson

Biography

Ph.D., Columbia University
M.A., University of Massachusetts Amherst
B.A., Hampshire College

I’m a historian of the United States, the US in the world, and global history. I offer a variety of courses, from our first-year liberal arts seminar sequence on the human condition and modernity to surveys of early American, modern US, and world history, US foreign relations, and the Global 1960s. I teach seminars on the history of Americans’ “forgotten” wars and occupations, Cuba-US relations, American political history, and American radicalism, as well as the historical thought and methods course required for History concentrators. I’ve also co-taught a Junior Proseminar on “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Color Line: Race, Power, and Politics,” with Francisca Oyogoa, Faculty in Sociology and African-American Studies (and served briefly on the town of Great Barrington’s official W.E.B. Du Bois Legacy Committee).

My first book, The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines, is forthcoming with the University of North Carolina Press in May 2025. (For the book’s website, and pre-ordering, click on its cover, below). My next research project is a history of the politics and economics of military occupation in U.S. history, from the American Revolution to recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I received my Ph.D. from Columbia University where my dissertation, defended with distinction, was nominated for the Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Dissertation Prize and the Bancroft Dissertation Award. My previous appointments include a position as Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in Global Histories in an interdisciplinary MA program at New York University, and a visiting fellowship at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Initiative on Global History. My research has been supported by the Doris Quinn Foundation and recognized by re:work, Work and Human Life-Cycle in Global History, at Humboldt University, in Berlin, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations, and the US Army Center of Military History. I also received visiting research affiliations with the Third World Studies Center at the University of Philippines at Diliman and the Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Cultura Cubana “Juan Marinello” in Havana, Cuba.

Selected publications include:

“Class/War: Can Labor and Military History Work Together?” for the “Up for Debate” feature, Labor: Working-Class Histories of the Americas (forthcoming, 2025).

“Militarized Mobility: The U.S. Army and Chinese Exclusion in America’s Empire at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century,” in Global Labor Migration: New Directions, ed. Eileen Boris, Heidi Gottfried, Julie Greene, and Joo-Cheong Tham (Studies of World Migration series, ed. James Engelhardt and Madeline Hsu, University of Illinois Press, 2022), pp. 42-60.

“An Empire of Reconstructions: Cuba and the Transformation of American Military Occupation,” in Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age, ed. David Prior (Fordham University Press, 2021), pp. 297-315.

“Roads to Empire: American Military Public Works in Capitalist Transitions in U.S. and World History.” Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 33, no. 1 (March 2020): 116-133.

“Crossing Islands and Oceans in Labor Histories of American Empire: Capital, Commodities, Coolies, and Consumers.” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 91 (Spring 2017): 180-196.

“‘A military necessity which must be pressed’: The U.S. Army and Forced Road Labor in the Early American Colonial Philippines,” in Marcel van der Linden and Magaly Rodríguez, eds., On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery (Brill, 2016), pp. 127–158.

“‘The Right Kind of Men’: Flexible Capacity, Chinese Exclusion, and the Imperial Politics of Maritime Labor Reform in the United States, 1898-1905.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, vol. 10, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 39-60.