Justin F. Jackson

Associate Professor of History

Contact

Hall College Center

Office: Second floor
jjackson@simons-rock.edu
413-528-7346

Academic Program Affiliation(s)

Asian Studies, Critical Geography, Political Ecology, and Globalization Studies, Cross-Cultural Relations, History, Social Scientific Inquiry Proseminar, Social Studies, Spanish and Latin American Studies

Areas of Specialization

United States and U.S. in the World
Global history
History of capitalism
Labor history
Military history
Cuba
Philippines

Spring 2023 Courses

First Year Seminar II
Freedom Struggles: Intro to U.S. History II, 1877 – Present
American Empire?: U.S. Foreign Relations History, 1776 – Present
What is Revolution?

Biography

Justin is a historian of the United States, the United States in the World, and global history, who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, with distinction. Having taught previously at Empire State College, the Pratt Institute, and New York University, he offers courses introducing students to American and global history and historical thought and methods. His book, The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialisms in Cuba and the Philippines, is currently under contract with University of North Carolina Press. His next research project is a history of military occupation and globalization in U.S. history, from the nation’s founding to recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has presented papers at annual meetings of the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Labor and Working Class History Association, among others, as well as international conferences in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, and the Philippines.

Selected publications include:

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