John Donoghue

About

John Donoghue (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, 2006; B.A. Westminster College, 1993) is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago where he teaches courses on colonial America, the United States, and history of the Atlantic world. 

Donoghue’s research focuses on the impact of radical politics, abolitionist thought, and religion in the seventeenth-century Anglo-American Atlantic world.  In “Fire Under the Ashes:” An Atlantic History of the English Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Donoghue traces the rise of abolitionist thought and action by following the lives of republican radicals around the Atlantic world during the age of the English Revolution. In Building the Atlantic Empires: Unfree Labor and Imperial States in the Political Economy of Capitalism, ca. 1500-1945 (Brill, 2015), co-edited with Evelyn Jennings, Donoghue explores how states secured their imperial interests by mobilizing various forms of unfree labor for military conquest, infrastructural development, and plantation work. His influential article “‘Out of the Land of Bondage’: The English Revolution and the Atlantic Origins of Abolition,” American Historical Review (2010) argues that multiple forms of bodily enslavement in the seventeenth-century formed a central component of England's nascent political economy of empire; he contends that transatlantic radicals sought to abolish these various forms of enslavement as part of a wider, republican program to deliver England and its colonial dominions from what they called the "slavery" of political tyranny.

Donoghue has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Michael Kraus Research Grant from the American Historical Association (2003), a Barbara S. Mosbacher Fellowship from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University (2019), a Michael J. Connell Foundation Fellowship from the Huntington Library (2019), a Visiting Fellowship from Trinity College at the University of Dublin (2011), a Joan and Bill Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual research grant (2011), the Mary C. Mooney Research Fellowship from the Boston Athenaeum (2003), and grants from the International Seminar for Atlantic History at Harvard University. Donoghue’s article “Radical Republicanism, Unfree Labor, and Imperialism in the Atlantic World, 1630-1661,” was the recipient of the bi-annual prize for Best Article by the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class Histories of the Americas in 2004. As a member of Historians Against Slavery, Donoghue works with other slavery scholars to end modern bondage by educating the public about its connections to historical slavery.

Research Interests

Atlantic history of the English Revolution, republicanism, slaveries in the early modern and twenty-first century global economies, the origins of abolitionism in the British Empire, piracy, and American exceptionalism

Courses Taught

Undergraduate Courses:

HIST 111: US to 1865

HIST 112: US from 1865

HIST 204: Global History since 1500

HIST 300: Slavery and Abolition: Then and Now

HIST 300: Pirates and Sailors in the Revolutionary Atlantic

HIST 362: America in the Age of Slavery and Capitalism

Break the Chains: Revolt, Rebellion, and Resistance in the World of Atlantic Slavery (with Prof. Jeff Glover, Spring 2016) Newberry Library Undergraduate Seminar

Graduate Courses:

HIST 400: Twentieth Century Approaches to History

HIST 410: Readings in British Atlantic History

HIST 410: Readings in Colonial American History

HIST 410: Readings in Early American History

Awards

Teaching Awards

Langerbeck Award for Undergraduate Research Mentoring (2014)

Master Teacher Award, College of Arts and Sciences, Loyola University Chicago (2012)

Sujack Award Nominee, College of Arts and Sciences, Loyola University Chicago (2009, 2012, 2014, 2018)

Selected Publications

Books

Building the Atlantic Empires: Unfree Labor and Imperial States in the Political Economy of Capitalism, ca. 1500-1914 [co-edited with Evelyn Jennings] (Leiden: Brill Publishers, Global Social History Series, 2015).

 “Fire Under the Ashes:” An Atlantic History of the English Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Selected Articles, Entries, Chapters

"Kidnappers and Subcontractors: Historical Perspectives on Human Trafficking,” Using History to Make Slavery History: The Past and the Challenge of Human Bondage in the New Millennium, Historians Against Slavery Book Series, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

“The Curse of Cromwell: Revisiting the Irish Slavery Debate,” History Ireland vol. 25, no. 4 (July/August 2017).

"Transatlantic Abolitionism and Radical Republicanism over the Long Term, 1640-1800” ( co- written with Anthony Di Lorenzo), La Révolution française: Cahiers de l'Institut d'histoire de la La Révolution française vol. 12 (March 2017).

“Resisting the 'Enslaving Design': Conscription, Military Labor, and the Radical Politics of the Body in England’s Atlantic Empire, ca. 1647-1660,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class Histories of the Americas vol. 13, no. 3 / 4 (December 2016), 3-30.

“The Unfree Origins of English Empire-Building in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic” in John Donoghue and Evelyn Jennings, eds., Building the Atlantic Empires: Unfree Labor and Imperial States in the Political Economy of Capitalism, ca. 1500-1945 (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2015), 109-131.

“Transatlantic Discourses of Freedom and Slavery in the English Revolution,” Storicamente: Laboratoria di Storia vol. 10 (2014).

“Class,” in Joseph Miller, ed., The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

“Out of the Land of Bondage”: The English Revolution and the Atlantic Origins of Abolition,” The American Historical Review, vol. 115, no. 4 (October 2010), 943-974.