Jay Cook

Please note: during AY2025-26, I will be on leave from UM and working as the Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.

My work as a U.S. cultural and intellectual historian has ranged widely across a number of different areas: popular/mass culture; the history of the global culture industries; the interrelation of culture and capitalism; urban history; African American art, ideas, and politics; the history of visuality; and the evolution of cultural history (i.e., as a field of historical analysis). I teach courses on the history of U.S. popular & mass culture; the cultural & intellectual history of New York City; the history & politics of global celebrity; African American arts & ideas; slavery & anti-slavery; the Civil War & Reconstruction eras; and approaches to cultural history. I have also worked in multiple media, incuding three published books, as well as consulting, writing, and on air media work for PBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other major outlets. At present, I am working on a number of projects that push well beyond those I have previously authored and/or edited. One is a collection of essays on the future directions of of U.S. cultural history, from its early focus on meaning making to more recent work on platforms, infrastructures, and attention economies. Another explores the origins of African American celebrity in global markets over 150 years—roughly from Phillis Wheatley to Paul Robeson. Broadly speaking, this second project is a book about historical conditions of possibility; the fungibility of commercial platforms; the creation of new categories of public life (e.g., the "celebrity activist”); and above all, the strategic uses of global markets, stages, media, and capital in the service of broader causes (from abolitionism to Pan Africanism). I am also developing a possible book and/or digital humanities project on the Fisk Jubilee Singers' first global tours (1882-1903) and their artistic and political effects. Between 2017 and 2021, I had the honor of serving as the Chair of UM History and helped to lead many of our recent public engagement, career diversity, digital humanities, and strategic hiring intiatives. In 2023, I was appointed the inaugural Director of Research for the Inclusive History Project at the University of Michigan, a tri-campus institutional history and public engagement intiative through the UM President's Office. In 2025-26,  I was the Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society.

Field(s) of Study

• 19th-century cultural and intellectual
• African-American
• Popular/mass culture
• Visual culture
• Capitalism

Selected Publications

The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present, & Future, co-edited with Lawrence Glickman and Michael O’Malley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)

The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like it in the Universe! (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005)

The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

"John Kasson's Cultural Turns: An Appreciation in Five Acts," The Carryall (September 2026)

"History Labs: Building a More Effective Case for the Power and Efficacy of Humanistic Training," co-authored with Rita Chin, Michelle May-Curry and Daniel Levine, eds., Routledge Companion to Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship (2024).

Principle contributor and talking head for the The Circus (2018), a 4-hours miniseries which originally aired on PBS's award-winning documentary series, American Experience, and is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime.

“Interchange: Globalization and its Limits between the American Revolution and the Civil War.” Invited forum contribution, Journal of American History, 103.2 (Sept 2016), 400-433.

“Finding Otira: On the Geopolitics of Black Celebrity,” Raritan (Fall 2014), 84-111. 

“William Henry Lane (‘Master Juba’),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (September 2013 release).

“The Kids Are All Right: On the ‘Turning’ of Cultural History,” American Historical Review, 117.3 (June 2012), 746-771. 

“Twelve Propositions for a History of U.S. Cultural History” (with Lawrence Glickman), The Cultural Turn in U.S. History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 3-57.

“The Return of the Culture Industry,” The Cultural Turn in U.S. History, 291-317. 

“Seeing the Visual in U.S. History,” Journal of American History, 95.2 (September 2008), 432-441. 

“Antebellum Cultural History,” Karen Halttunen, ed., The Blackwell Companion to American Cultural History (New York: Blackwell, 2008), 65-78. 

“Master Juba, the King of All Dancers! A Fugitive Story from the Dawn of the Transatlantic Culture Industry,” Discourses in Dance, Volume 3, No. 2 (2006), 6-20. 

“Dancing Across the Color Line: A Story of Markets and Mixtures From New York’s Five Points,” Common-place, 4.1 (October 2003).