Justin F. Jackson

A historian of the United States, the US in the world, and global history, Justin Jackson's research and teaching interests span from histories of American foreign relations, war, labor, and migration to US political 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 the problem of military occupation across US history, from the American Revolution to recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jackson received his Ph.D. from Columbia University where his dissertation, defended with distinction, was nominated for the Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Dissertation Prize and the Bancroft Dissertation Award.

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.

In the fall 2026 semester, Jackson will be a George A. Miller Visiting Scholar with the Center of Advanced Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he is co-organizing an April 2027 conference, "The Infrastructures of Empire, and the Empire of Infrastructure," sponsored by the University of Illinois and the University of Birmingham (UK).

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: Between Ruin and Restoration, America’s History in One Berkshire Home.

Selected Journal Articles:

• The Empire of Military Necessity: General Orders No. 100, Atrocity, and the Law of Occupation between the Civil and Philippine Wars,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 113, Issue 1 (June 2026): 15-41.

• “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).

• “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

   

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.

   

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.