John Dixon is a historian of early America and the early modern Atlantic world who teaches at the College of Staten Island and the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests include intellectual and cultural history, early American Jewish history, the Enlightenment, and New York history.
A former Associate Editor of the Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, he received his Ph.D. in American history from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007 and joined the faculty of the College of Staten Island in 2009. He became Chair of the College’s History Department in 2024. He regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of America before 1865, the history of New York, American thought and culture, historical methods, and historiography. He is currently working on a survey history of Jews, empires, and the early Americas.
Degrees
Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
M.A., University of East Anglia, England
B.A., University of Birmingham, England
Selected publications
“Rethinking American Jewish Emancipation: New Views on George Washington’s Newport Letter,” American Jewish History 107, no. 4 (2023): 731–756.
“The U.S. and the Rest: Old and New Paradigms of Early American Jewish History,” in Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World, eds. Aviva Ben-Ur and Wim Kloster (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023), 22–41.
“Early American and Atlantic Jewish History: Currents and Crosscurrents,” Early American Literature 57, no. 3 (2022): 919–923.
“Jewish New York Inside and Out: Violence, Ethnicity, and Embeddedness in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan,” New York History 103, no. 1 (2022): 4–13.
“Colonial Jews in New Amsterdam, New York, and the Atlantic World,” in The Jewish Metropolis: New York City from the 17th to the 21st Century, ed. Daniel Soyer (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021), 1–18.
The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden: Empire, Science, and Intellectual Culture in British New York (Cornell University Press, 2016)
- Winner of the New York Academy of History’s Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship, 2016.
“The Enlightenment and America,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-325), published online July 2016.
“Henry F. May and the Revival of the American Enlightenment: Problems and Possibilities for Intellectual and Social History,” William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2014): 255‒280.
“Between Script and Specie: Cadwallader Colden’s Printing Method and the Production of Permanent, Correct Knowledge,” Early American Studies 8, no.1 (2010): 75–9.
