About
Justin F. Jackson
Ph.D., Columbia University
MA, University of Massachusetts; BA, Hampshire College
A historian of the United States, the US in the world, and global history, I’m currently an Associate Professor of History at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. My research and teaching interests include the history of American labor, immigration, warfare, and foreign relations from international and comparative perspectives, American radicalism and politics, US relations with Cuba and the Philippines, Pacific history, the global 1960s, and infrastructure. 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, see below). My next research project is a history of the politics and economics of military occupation in US history, from the American Revolution to recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I received my Ph.D. from Columbia University where my dissertation, which I 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 postdoctoral position teaching global history at New York University, and a visiting fellowship at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Initiative on Global History. My research has been funded 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.
At Simon’s Rock, 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 and the history of 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 co-taught a seminar on “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Color Line: Race, Power, and Politics,” and served briefly on the town of Great Barrington’s official W.E.B. Du Bois Legacy Committee.
As an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at NYU’s John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought, I taught graduate courses in global history methods and historiography, American and comparative empires and colonialism, and the global history of labor and capitalism. Over the years, I’ve also been pleased to occasionally teach history courses at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and, in New York City, at the Pratt Institute and Empire State College’s Harry van Arsdale, Jr., School of Labor Studies.
I currently live with my partner and her two cats, Sahara and Suki, in western Massachusetts, where we still drink from Mason jars, worship the Red Sox, and believe that Beacon Hill neglects us.
Contact
The Work of Empire
War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines