Justin Leroy, Assistant Professor of History

I specialize in nineteenth-century African American history, with particular expertise in intellectual history and Black political thought, slavery and emancipation, and racial capitalism. My book The Lowest Freedom recovers an unexamined tradition in nineteenth-century Black thought that locates the failures of emancipation not simply in political exclusion and racial violence, but in wide-ranging forms of economic dispossession that continued to define Black life in freedom. With Destin Jenkins, I co-edited a collection of essays titled Histories of Racial Capitalism. My current interests are in carceral studies and the histories of policing and mass incarceration. I am currently at work on a history of race and policing in nineteenth-century North America. I also maintain  secondary interests in comparative Black/Indigenous history and Black/Asian American history.

I am currently accepting graduate students, and prospective students should feel free to contact me.

Contact Info:

Office Location:	114 Campus Drive, 226 Classroom Bldg, Durham, NC 27708-0719
Email Address:

Teaching (Spring 2026):

• HISTORY 511S.01, ATLANTIC WORLDS RESEARCH Synopsis

  Class Bldg 229, M 04:40 PM-07:10 PM

  (also cross-listed as AAAS 533S.01, ICS 545S.01, LIT 509S.01)

Office Hours:

You can make an appointment here.

Education:

D.Phil.

New York University

2014

Recent Publications

1. Histories of racial capitalism (2021), Columbia University Press
2. Leroy, J, Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements of Slavery and Settler Colonialism, Theory & Event, vol. 19 no. 4 (2016)
3. Kish, Z; Leroy, J, Bonded Life, Cultural Studies, vol. 29 no. 5-6 (September, 2015), pp. 630-651, Routledge [doi]