J.Z. (Jason) Resnikoff, PhD

EDUCATION

                                                                                                    

2019

         Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University

         MA 2014, MPhil 2015

         PhD, History, May 2019

Dissertation: “The Misanthropic Sublime: Automation and the Meaning of Work in the Post-War United States,” Dissertation Committee: Casey Blake (sponsor), Alice Kessler-Harris, Robert Amdur, Elizabeth Blackmar, Nelson Lichtenstein

 

2008  

         Columbia College, Columbia University, New York, NY

         Bachelor of Arts, awarded 2008

summa cum laude, Early Phi Beta Kappa, honors in the history department, recipient of The Garrett Mattingly Prize, and The Chanler Historical Prize for senior thesis essay.

 EMPLOYMENT

Fall 2022 – Present

          Assistant Professor of Contemporary History, University of Groningen/Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

 

Fall 2019 – Spring 2022

         Lecturer, History Department, Columbia University

 

Fall 2018

         Instructor, teaching Contemporary Civilization, Center for Justice at Columbia University, Justice-in-Education Initiative, Taconic Correctional Facility

 

 

PUBLICATIONS                                                                              

Book                                            .

 Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work (Working-Class in American History Series, University of Illinois Press, in production, 2021).

Articles and Reviews

 with Salem Elzway, "Whence Automation? The History (and Possible Futures) of a Concept," Labor (forthcoming, 2023)

 Review: Carl Benedikt Frey, The Technology Trap, in: Labor (forthcoming 2023)

 "AI Won't Kill Our Jobs--But It Will Make Them Worse," Washington Post, June 19, 2023

 "How Basic Income Became the Pessimist's Utopia," Jacobin, May 17, 2023

 "The Weakness of Labor, Not Automation, Is the Greatest Challenge Facing Workers," Jacobin, March 25, 2023.

 “The Myth of Black Obsolescence,” International Labor and Working Class History, vol. 102, Fall 2022, 124-145.

 "How Do You Know What to Shoot?" Los Angeles Review of Books, December 2022.

 “How ‘Automation’ Made America Work Harder,” Zócalo Public Square, September 2, 2021.

 “The Paradox of Automation: QWERTY and The Neuter Keyboard” Labor, Issue 18.4, December 2021, 9-39.

• Winner of Best Article Prize for most outstanding article in Labor, years 2020/2021

“The Problem with Postwork: Work and the Work Ethic as Units of Historical Analysis,” International Labor and Working-Class History, Volume 94, Fall 2018.

“The Bad Ivy: Columbia and the Long Struggle for Graduate Student Employee Rights,” Tropics of Meta, May 5, 2018

“HAL, Mother, and Father,” The Paris Review, January 9, 2015, listed in Paris Review’s Best-of-2015

Contributor to, Encyclopedia of American Recessions and Depressions (2 volumes), ed. Daniel Leab, (ABC-CLIO, 2014).

“Hunting the Whale,” The Paris Review, September 25, 2013

“Thomas Crown’s Global Vision,” The Paris Review, July 1, 2013

“The Thin End of the Wedge: Faculty House, Columbia University, and the Future of Higher Education in the United States of America” Tropics of Meta, March 25, 2013

“The Indescribable Frankenstein,” The Paris Review, March 5, 2013

 

PAPERS PRESENTED, MEETINGS                                                                                                       .

          “Automation, Scientific Progress, and Workers Control,” Gordan Cain Conference, Science History Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 3, 2022.

 “The Myth of Black Obsolescence,” presented at the DC Labor History Seminar, Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, Georgetown University, January 14, 2022.

          “How the QWERTY Keyboard Lost its Gender,” Labor and Working-Class History Association, Chicago, Illinois, May 26-28, 2021.

         Organizer of the Panel “Automation Past and Present,” Society for the History of Technology, New Orleans, November 2021. Paper to be presented, “Automation is an Ideology.” [N.B. While this panel was accepted by the conference, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic required that the panel be pulled from the program, much to my disappointment. It is tentatively on the panel for SHOT’s next annual meeting.]

 “Postwar Post-Scarcity: Murray Bookchin, Anarchism, and the Degradation of Labor,” Intellectual Traditions of Protest, Power, and Patriotism, Society for US Intellectual History, New York, New York, November 9, 2019.

 “Speed Up Will Set You Free: Labor Narratives in the Postwar United States,” Workers on the Move, Labor and Working Class History Association Annual Conference, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, May 30-June 1, 2019.

 “Where Have All the Robots Gone?: Automation, the ‘Humanization’ of Work, and the Automobile Industry in the Long 1970s,” Technology and Citizenship, Annual Conference in Citizenship Studies, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, March 28-29, 2019.

 “Freedom is a Life Beyond the Body: Automation and the Meaning of Work in Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex,” Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, Atlanta, Georgia, November 8-11, 2018.

 Discussant, “Technology and the Future of Work,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Royal Society, House of the Academy, Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 20-21, 2018.

 “The Misanthropic Sublime: Automation, Radicalism, and the Meaning of Labor in the Post-War United States,” presented at the History of Capitalism conference, Cornell University, September 30, 2016.

 “James Boggs and the Misanthropic Sublime,” presented at the meeting of the Intellectual and Cultural History Society, January 29, 2016, Columbia University, New York, NY.

          “Precarious Labor in the Academy,” presented at the American Studies Association annual meeting, Toronto, Canada, October 8, 2015.

 “Reaping the Whirlwind: American Psychologists and the First World War; or, An Introduction to Warspace,” presented at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society’s conference, Measurement, April 19, 2013, Deutsches Haus, Columbia University, New York, NY.

        

TEACHING AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

          

• Certificate in Inclusive Teaching, Awarded by the Center for Teaching and Learning, Columbia University, Fall 2019
• Mini-Institute on Anti-Black Racism, School of Social Work, Columbia University, Summer 2020
• Thesis Advisor, American Studies Department, 2018-2020

 

TEACHING AND RESEARCH INTERESTS

          History of Technology                                    Political History

         Labor History                                                    Social History

         Intellectual History                                          History of Capitalism

         US History                                                       Western Philosophy