Jonathan Merritt Nash

Associate Professor

Education

• Ph.D., University at Albany, SUNY
• M.A., University at Albany, SUNY
• B.A., Xavier University

Teaches

• FYS/Honors 100 101: First Year Seminar
• HIST 152: Liberty, Empire, and Faith in U.S. History
• HIST 295C: Struggle For Freedom
• HIST 350: Sex and Power in Early America
• HIST 355: Slavery in the Atlantic World
• HIST 395A: Interpreting the American Revolution

Academic and Research Interests

I study Early America and the Atlantic World, focusing on the American Revolution, the early U.S. republic, the history of the transatlantic slave trade, and the intersections of crime, punishment, and reform.

My research explores the rise of imprisonment in the United States by looking at the lives of the nation’s first prisoners. I’m now expanding this focus to the carceral Atlantic, tracing how ideas and practices of incarceration moved between England, the United States, and the British Caribbean, especially The Bahamas. This work uncovers how colonial and post-colonial systems used imprisonment to enforce racial and economic hierarchies, while claiming to offer reform.

Publications

“An ‘Adobe of Discipline and Misery’: Wheelbarrow Men, Reformers, and the Penitentiary in Early National Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 92 (Winter 2025): 1-32

“Practicing Benedictine Values to Create an Inclusive Learning Environment,”Headwaters 30 (2017): 223-241.

“‘The Prison Has Failed’: The New York State Prison, In the City of New York, 1797-1828,”New York History 98.1 (2017): 71-89.

“‘This Scourge Of Confinement’: James Morton’s Experiences of Incarceration in the Antebellum United States,”Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography 139 (April 2015): 109-134.