Professor of History, Director, Institute for the Humanities; Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities
About
Jason R. Young is a Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He teaches and researches in the fields of Nineteenth-Century United States History, African American History, and the African Diaspora. He specializes in the history of art, religion, and folk culture.
Jason Young is the author of Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry Region of Georgia and South Carolina in the Era of Slavery, an exploration into the religious and ritual practices that linked West-Central Africa with the Lowcountry region of Georgia and South Carolina. He is also the co-editor, with Edward J. Blum, of The Souls of W.E.B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections, a collection of articles that examines Du Bois’s personal religious convictions along with his scholarly examinations of religion. Jason Young is also the Co-Curator of Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, a touring exhibition that opened at the Metropolitan Museum (MET) in 2022 before traveling to the Museum of Fine Art (MFA), Boston, the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) and the High Museum. Young has published articles in The Journal of African American History, The Journal of Africana Religions, and The Journal of Southern Religion, among others. His latest book project, The Mask of Memory: White Racial Fantasy after the Civil War will be published in 2026 by the University of North Carolina Press.
