James M. Masnov

James M. Masnov is a Columbian Distinguished Fellow at George Washington University's History Department. James earned his BA in History at Western Oregon University and his MA in History at Portland State University. His work has been published in both academic and general-readership publications. His first monograph, Rights Reign Supreme: An Intellectual History of Judicial Review and the Supreme Court, was published by McFarland Books in 2023. In recent years, just prior to joining the History PhD Program at GW, James worked as an adjunct professor of history at Chemeketa Community College and Linn-Benton Community College in Oregon, where he taught the U.S. Survey, the History of the United States in the 1960s, and a Community Education course of his own design covering the history of the Supreme Court.

James plans to pursue graduate work and a dissertation that will address the social and legal expectations of collective slave-catching in the colonial and early republican eras, the Fugitive Slave Clause in the U.S. Constitution, and the resulting Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. The work will also scrutinize the unique friendships between prominent abolitionists in Pennsylvania and Virginia with the Virginia slaveholding elite in the 1780s and 1790s. Abolitionist sentiment was more common and made more of an impact, particularly in 1780s Virginia, than is often appreciated or understood, before ultimately closing and indeed reversing. These strange and strained relationships between abolitionists and slaveholders in the early American republic require fresh examination and analysis.