Ph.D. Students

Justin Ramsey-Brown specializes in print culture and Marxist history from below and utilizes these interpretive frameworks to parse the complex material and rhetorical histories of the early American South. While at Boston College, Justin aims to contribute to emergent studies of everyday resistance – telling stories of revolts, refusals, and struggles, as they played out in print, below the Mason-Dixon line, from the early republic era to the end of Reconstruction. In his prospective dissertation project, Justin will focus on what he has coined “incendiary print culture;” that is, the political, social, and economic culture of radical print in the South which is often overlooked in scholarship on early America. His work will follow printers, writers, editors, community leaders, and teachers as they use the medium of cheap popular print (newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, handbills, broadsides, primers, etc.) to set fire to the status quo and, in turn, have their own work burned – literally and figuratively – in the process. Justin's attention to Southern print culture both recovers the work of heretofore overlooked radical figures like Charleston, SC's J.J. Negrin, who was jailed for printing the Haitian Declaration of Independence in 1804, and situates similar snapshots of resistance within a broader constellation of Southern print activism, including William Grimes’s forging of literacy and print skills while enslaved in Savannah, GA, the fiery poetry included in, and the blazing rebirth of, the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, and radical reading classes held by Charlotte Forten for the formerly enslaved during the Port Royal Experiment, among others. Justin holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Augusta University and a master’s degree in English from Loyola University Chicago. When he is not reading or writing for his courses or research, Justin can most often be found exploring the outdoors with his fiancée, spoiling his cat with too many treats, or playing online video games with childhood friends.