Maurice Jackson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History. His current research interests include Race and Revolution in the Atlantic World, African American History and Culture (especially Jazz and Spirituals), African-American intellectual history, social and labor movements, and the history of Washington, DC.

Jackson’s manuscript LET THIS VOICE BE HEARD: Anthony Benezet and Atlantic Abolition will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in the fall of 2008. The work is an intellectual and social history of the transatlantic fight against slavery triggered by the Philadelphia based French born Huguenot, Anthony Benezet (1713-1784).

Jackson’s article ‘Friends of the Negro! Fly with me, The path is open to the sea:’“ Remembering the Haitian Revolution in the History, Music and Culture of the African American People,” will appear in Early American Studies, Spring 2008. His chapter “The Rise of Abolition,” appears in The Atlantic World, 1450-2000, Indiana University Press, 2008.

Jackson will soon begin work on two new projects. The first is, Race over Reason: The Social, Intellectual and Political Foundations of America’s Abandonment of Its Black Brethren in the Aftermath of the Revolutionary War. The second is a social and cultural history of African Americans in Washington, D.C.

Jackson recently spoke at a symposium “James and Esther Jackson, the American Left and the Origins of the Modern Civil Rights Movement,” as they dedicated the papers of the Southern Negro Youth Conference, to New York University’s Tamiment Library. In the fall 2007, Jackson helped open the celebration at Duke University honoring the 90th birthday of the legendary North Carolina born pianist, Thelonius Monk. He began with a talk on the origins of Negro Spirituals. He then introduced a concert of Negro spirituals with jazz greats, Hank Jones on piano and Charlie Haden on bass.