Jajuan Johnson

Education

B.S., Arkansas State University
M.Div., Oral Roberts University
M.A., Arkansas State University
Ph.D., Arkansas State University

Biography

Dr. Jajuan Johnson, the Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow with the Lemon Project at William & Mary, is a public historian and heritage studies scholar with research and teaching expertise on Africana Studies research methods, slavery and memory, and racial terrorism. 

His research explores the power of places of difficult histories and heritage to cultivate public emotion (such as fear, empathy, and hope) and generate a collective sense of community in the aftermath of traumatizing events of the distant and recent pasts. He explores these dynamics in his study, "'They Didn't Burn Down Our Spirits:' Heritage Terrorism and Black Church Burnings in the Age of Obama." 

Drawing on Africana, anti-racist, and feminist theories, his work on heritage landscapes critically interrogates dominant narratives of cultural memory and questions historical injustices in the United States and transatlantic contexts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Dr. Johnson's career in public history spans more than a decade. As the Director of Research and Public Programming with Mosaic Templars Cultural Center: A Museum of African American History, he piloted community-engaged research initiatives whereby local Black communities guided the interpretation of state-wide Black history. While the Assistant Director of the Starr Center at Washington College in Maryland, he co-led the Mellon Foundation-funded Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project focused on digitizing, preserving, and making accessible materials related to African American history and culture in Kent County, Maryland and beyond. 

At William & Mary's Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation, he researches the university's historical ties to slavery and its legacies. He works with descendant communities to make ancestral connections to persons enslaved by the university or its associates, such as faculty and Board of Visitors members. He has lectured nationally and internationally on African American cultural preservation, descendant-engaged research, and historical memory. 

Dr. Johnson was a 2022-2023 Cultural Vistas Fellow, a transatlantic network of experts who promote an inclusive and progressive culture of remembrance in public spaces in Germany and the United States. He has been published in Ethnohistory, Southern Cultures, and the Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies. He has forthcoming essays in the books Preserving Culture in Times of Crisis and Change Convening and Religion and American Politics: Domestic and International Contexts. 

He is a member of the Oral History Association, Association of Critical Heritage Studies, American Anthropological Association, Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, and active with the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium.