I am a professor of History at Tulane University. I specialize in Central America, particularly interested in the construction of identity within the context of everyday politics. At the same time, my work seeks to cross back and forth over the boundaries between social scientific and cultural analysis, to explore the interconnections between structure and imagining. In recent years I have also become interested in documentary filmmaking and visual narrative and in practices of community-engaged research. I have served twice in the past as a Faculty Fellow in Tulane’s Mellon Graduate Program in Community-Engaged Scholarship and am currently a member of the Imagining America National Gathering Working Group for the 2022 National Gathering in New Orleans, Rituals of Repair and Renewal.
Research
My first project, The Everyday Nation-State: Community and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Nicaragua analyzes how popular communities understood, negotiated and transformed the meaning of national identity in the struggles of everyday politics.
I am currently writing On Equal Grounds: Race and Empire in the Age of Manifest Destiny, which explores the Caribbean port town of San Juan del Norte (rechristened Greytown after British occupation in 1848), which transformed during the California Gold Rush from a sleepy trading post into a teeming crossroads of cultures and politics. To the great surprise of so many travelers, it was also a place where much of the commerce and governance was in the hands of people of African descent from the Caribbean, the U.S., and Nicaragua. At the heart of the study is the clash between the dream of Greytown’s inhabitants to fashion the town as an island of political freedom, racial equality, and entrepreneurial independence and the US projection of imperialism, white supremacy, and commercial expansionism. The former proved no match for the latter and sparks turn to outright conflagration when, in July of 1854, the US landed marines who reduced Greytown to ashes.
Contact me
Prof. Justin Wolfe Department of History 6823 St. Charles Ave. Tulane University New Orleans, LA 70118