Jason Ambroise

Jason R. Ambroise specializes in U.S. History since the 19th century, the History of Science, and Black Studies. He holds a PhD and MA degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a BA from Stanford University.

Ambroise's research and scholarship are in conversation and historical engagement with the discourses, practices, and modes of socio-human organization generated from the two major secular-humanisms emerging within the post-medieval (early- and late-modern) West. The first is that of the Lay-Renaissance Civic humanism that spearheaded the formation of the early-modern, secular-political West. While the second is the Western-Bourgeois (neo)Liberal humanism that helped usher in the late-modern, industrial-economic era — as an ethno-class humanism anchored by its 19th century practitioners in a purely biological definition of being human.

Ambroise’s projects trace the lived history of this ethno-class and purely biocentric self-definition. His projects specifically interrogate how this paradigm’s reduction of socio-human existence to being a function of purely biological processes (i.e., “universal Darwinism”) has given rise to a host of bio-mythological and anti-human discourses and practices — including those derived from the fictional symbolic code of race, as well as those operating at the level of class, gender, sexual orientation, the “imagined community” of the nation, and so on. His projects are as well part of an ongoing re-definition of being human by a line of activist-intellectuals and scholars who, in challenging what Glynn Isaacs has characterized as the “part science, part myth” over-reach of this purely biocentric self-definition, have pushed towards what Sylvia Wynter has formulated as her new meta-Darwinian, meta-Western understanding of us as a hybridly biological and storytelling / mythmaking species — i.e., as Homo narrans.

Ambroise is the author of peer- and editorial-reviewed essays and book chapters, as well as a documentary script-writer and consultant. He is co-editor (with Sabine Broeck) of Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology (2015), as well as a co-editor (with the Sylvia Wynter Editorial Collective) of Wynter’s in-progress anthology, “That the Future May Finally Commence”: Essays for Our Ecumenically Human’s Sake, 1984-2015. Ambroise’s in-progress book manuscript is titled, Order and Condemnation: Inventing “the Criminal” at the Formation of Late-Modern U.S. He is the recipient of prestigious fellowships and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Echoing Green Foundation.