Jason Ahlenius

Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Jason Ahlenius is a scholar of nineteenth-century Mexican cultural studies and history whose research explores the culture and politics of labor, race, empire, and borderlands in the Americas. His current book manuscript, The Limits of Freedom, explores the conflicting understandings of freedom and equality by Indigenous, Black, and white/Creole persons on nineteenth-century Mexico’s borderlands. Mexico followed Haiti to became one of the first nations in the Americas to abolish slavery and colonial caste categories, but various forms of racialized forced labor persisted to sustain agricultural capitalism in Texas, Yucatán, and Chiapas. This project rethinks Mexican culture from the borderlands by analyzing print culture, photography, and other archival records to highlight conflicting claims to labor and land. He has received fellowships from the Social Sciences Research Council, Fulbright-Hays Program, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and NYU’s Graduate Research Initiative to carry out archival research in Mexico, the U.S., Guatemala, Cuba, and Spain. He received his PhD from NYU, and his MA from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.