About Jonathan M. Hansen
I am a Senior Lecturer on Social Studies and Faculty Associate, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, at Harvard University. An intellectual historian, I am the author of Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Guantanamo: An American History (Hill and Wang, 2011), and The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890-1920 (Chicago, 2003), along with articles, op-eds, and book reviews on U.S. imperialism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and race and ethnicity published in the New York Times, Huffington Post, Guardian, and Cognoscenti, among other places. Currently, I teach a year-long Introduction to Social Thought and a junior tutorial entitled Justice and Reconciliation after Mass Violence. In recent years, I have taught a freshman seminar on PTSD in American history and seminars (with Robert Mnookin) on reconciliation and intractable conflicts at Harvard Law School. My interest in peace and reconciliation stems from my roots in U.S. history as well as from yearly trips (since 2010) to Rwanda, where I am laying the groundwork for a biography of president Paul Kagame.
Research
My research explores the moral, political, and legal boundaries of the modern nation state. I am interested in the question of how Americans have tried to reconcile claims of national solidarity with international, trans- (and sub-) national commitments and allegiances. For much of the nineteenth century this question played out domestically in contests over citizenship and civic inclusion. The consolidation of the nation state in the aftermath of the Civil War only deepened the dilemma as the U.S. set out across the globe championing universal liberty and national interest, often in the same breath.
Historically, few Americans paid close attention over the years to the paradox inherent in the ideologies of manifest destiny, 100% Americanism, empire for liberty, and war to end war. My first book The Lost Promise of Patriotism focuses on those who did. It scrutinizes a group of American cultural critics—W.E.B. Du Bois, Jane Addams, Eugene V. Debs, among others—who resisted the imperialism latent in American civic identity and opposed the tendency of nationalism to swamp other social and political affiliations.
My second book Guantánamo: An American History elaborates on and extends these themes. The book sets out explain the development of a place beyond the reach of U.S., Cuban, and international law. In order to understand an apparent anomaly, it reaches back beyond the expansionary dreams of colonial Americans to the discovery of the New World.
Young Castro focuses on Castro’s intellectual inheritance, political philosophy, and decision-making process—subject matter curiously absent from Castro biographies. Rather than interpreting Castro as a pawn in East-West relations, I show him attempting to chart a culturally specific (pluralist) path to political and economic development in a bi-polar world, while wrestling with a dilemma fundamental to war-torn postcolonial societies, namely how to balance civil and political liberties against more basic needs like access to food, clean water, healthcare, and education. A voracious and catholic reader, Castro drew simultaneously on European enlightenment and counter-enlightenment traditions, attempting to reconcile their universal lessons with what he believed to be a distinctive Latin American and, especially Cuban, history and culture. There is much Marx in Castro’s thinking, but no little Weber, much of the French Revolutionaries, but no little Romanticism, all of which, of course, yields pride of place to Cuba’s own José Martí—a veritable hodge-podge of intellectual influences in desperate need of sorting out.
Teaching
The naïveté behind this vision did not make it through Haverford College, but my sense of teaching as a rewarding and rejuvenating profession sharpened in the company of professors who were accomplished scholars, and who were at once friendly and professional, encouraging and demanding, committed to students and yet doggedly engaged in their own work. With the door to graduate school barred by a lackluster college career, I taught high school for five years, before finding myself starved for the critical engagement that I had come to appreciate too late at Haverford. I resolved to claw myself into graduate school. Once there I discovered in John Dewey’s and Jane Addams’ pragmatism, William James’ and Montaigne’s skepticism, and Mill’s utilitarianism a vision of education and the examined life that seemed altogether in keeping with my own largely inchoate educational philosophy. The rest is history.
Over the years, my research has generated courses designed to meet the interests of students coming of age in a dynamic, volatile world. My teaching emphasizes the essential theme of my scholarship, namely, that for students of U.S. history there is no choosing between issues “foreign” and “domestic.” In Social Studies, in the Harvard history department, in the Freshman Seminar Program, and more recently at Harvard Law School, I have led seminars on justice and reconciliation after mass violence, American civic identity, race and ethnicity, U.S. imperialism, justice and law in U.S. history, PTSD in American wars, and negotiation. I have also taught the modern U.S. survey and a course on the American Civil War.
