Justin Rogers

Justin Isaac Rogers joined the faculty of the University of North Florida as Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies in Fall 2022. He holds a B.A. in History and Political Science from North Carolina State University and a M.A. and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Mississippi, where he also taught for several years.

Broadly defined, Rogers’s research and teaching focus on African American History, Native American History, Public History, American slavery, the history of the United States South, race, religion, and gender. He has worked with numerous Public History initiatives, most notably Behind the Big House in Holly Springs, Mississippi and Burns-Belfry Multicultural Center and Museum in Oxford, Mississippi.

Rogers’s current book project, Southern Confluence: Constructing and Crossing Color Lines in the Nineteenth-Century South, explores how Black, Indigenous, and white peoples navigated, adapted, and adopted racial and religious ideas during Indian Removal and slavery’s expansion. It reckons with how the forced removal process shaped chattel slavery and the formation of racial lines in the South, overlapped with the development of a violent Calvinistic religious culture, and transformed the status of enslaved Afro-Indian peoples. By exposing the localized relationships that facilitated slavery’s growth and Indigenous dispossession and the individuals who challenged these transformations, his work fuses interdisciplinary scholarship on race, violence, settler colonialism, gender, religion, and historical memory.