Jason K. Duncan was born in Albany, New York, and educated in Catholic schools in that city. He graduated in 1985 from St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, a college originally in the Universalist tradition, with a B.A. in Government. He later earned an M.A. in Russian Area Studies from Georgetown University, writing his Master’s Essay on “Martin Luther King, Jr. Through Soviet Eyes.” He then worked in politics, including three years as a legislative assistant in Washington, D.C. to U.S. Representative Tom Sawyer of Ohio.
Professor Duncan went on to earn his Ph.D. in American History from the University of Iowa in 1999, writing a dissertation entitled “A Most Democratic Class: New York Catholics and the Early American Republic.” In 2002, he joined the faculty at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he is currently Professor of History. He teaches classes in American and Russian History, and has twice served as co-director of the college’s semester program in Ireland, where he taught Irish History.
Professor Duncan has presented academic papers at venues such as the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the American Catholic Historical Association, and the Society for United States Intellectual History, and the Conference on American Political History. He has also given invited lectures at the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame and the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University.
In November 2013, Routledge University Press published his most recent book, John F. Kennedy: The Spirit of Cold War Liberalism. His first book, Citizens or Papists? The Politics of Anti-Catholicism in New York, 1685-1821, was published by Fordham University Press in 2005.
His current research is on the 1836 presidential election; he is writing a book on it for University Press of Kansas’s series on American Presidential Elections entitled A Victory of Party: Martin Van Buren, the Democrats, and the Election of 1836, Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, American Presidential Elections Series, (forthcoming.)
Jason Duncan lives in Grand Rapids with his wife Amy, their sons Leo and Jack, and their beagle, Madigan.
