Justin F. Jackson

A historian of the United States, the US in the world, and global history, Justin Jackson's research and teaching interests include the history of American labor, migration, 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. His current book project, “Occupying America: War, Politics, and Military Government’s Rise and Fall in the United States and a Globalizing World,” reexamines military occupation across US history, from the American Revolution to recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University where his dissertation, which he defended with distinction, was nominated for the Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Dissertation Prize and the Bancroft Dissertation Award. His previous appointments include a postdoctoral position as Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in Global Histories at New York University, a visiting fellowship at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Initiative on Global History, and a faculty position in History at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, where he received tenure before the college closed, in June 2025.

His 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, the 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. He 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.

As an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at NYU’s John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought, he taught graduate courses in global history methods and historiography, American and comparative empires and colonialism, and the global history of labor and capitalism. He has also taught survey courses at the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, and Empire State College’s Harry van Arsdale, Jr., School of Labor Studies, in Manhattan.

Books:

• The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines (The University of North Carolina Press, 2025).

In Progress:

• Occupying America: War, Politics, and Military Government’s Rise and Fall in the United States and a Globalizing World. 

• Cherry Cottage: America’s History in One Berkshire Home.

Forthcoming Publications:

• “The Empire of Military Necessity: General Orders 100, Atrocity, and the Law of Occupation’s Strange Career between the Civil and Philippine-American Wars.” (accepted, Journal of American History).

• “Class/War: Can Labor and Military History Work Together?” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History. vol. 22, no. 3, September 2025 issue (for “Up for Debate” feature: “The Wages of War: Debating Military and Labor History,” respondents Reena Goldthree, John Hall, and Tejasvi Nagaraja).

Book Chapters:

• “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 (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.

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

Selected Journal Articles:

• “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.

• “‘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.

Review Essays:

• “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.