The modern historian investigating debt and creating space for collaboration

                                                                           Photo credit: Jermaine Jackson, Jr. 

Every year, Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences welcomes exceptional scholars across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. This series profiles six of the faculty joining the FAS in the 2025–26 academic year, highlighting their academic achievements, research ambitions, and the teaching they hope to do at Yale. Learn more about the incoming faculty joining the FAS. 

Destin Jenkins wants to be influenced—by colleagues, students, and the city of New Haven itself.

“I want my research agenda to be transformed by the things I see, the people I talk to, the sounds I hear,” says Jenkins, a modern historian of the United States who joins the FAS as Associate Professor of History and Black Studies.

Jenkins is a historian of the late nineteenth century to the present and examines the historical linkages between race and capitalism, and their reverberations to today. In his earlier work, Jenkins says, he was not just interested in “logics of race and capital,” but also in the “range of political and economic responses of Black people to racial capitalism.” These include “Black entrepreneurial activity under Jim Crow, Black insurance companies or barbershops, [or] striking Black dock workers who disrupted the movement of critical goods in and out of the American South.” In a word, Jenkins says, he’s interested in politics, and especially how Black people have responded to economic systems.

While his research has partly been driven by an overarching interest in this history, his work has also been profoundly shaped by the places he’s lived during his academic career—first at the University of Chicago, and most recently at Stanford. Jenkins credits Chicago with being the city that made him realize “the specific place in which you study, work, and research has a profound impact on what you do, on the questions you ask.” 

Next up is New Haven, a city he’s raring to get to know.

He'll get to do that right off the bat with a first-year seminar called “Navigating the American City,” which he hopes will allow him to explore his new home alongside students who are also new to the area. “I don't know New Haven at all. Like all cities, there are similarities. But it doesn’t feel like Oakland. It’s not like San Francisco, New York, or Boston—it has its own flavor and its own character,” Jenkins says, his enthusiasm evident. “I figured, what better way to get to know the city than with first-year undergrads who are doing the same thing?” 

The class isn’t just about New Haven, Jenkins notes, and will give students a theoretical foundation for understanding and analyzing the urban history, public spaces, and economic basis of any American city they may find themselves in. The goal is to help students’ ‘practice’ the art of getting from place to place across Yale’s urban campus, within New Haven and beyond, and to offer students historically informed methods for determining their social and physical positions relative to others in the city. That is, after all, what it means to ‘navigate,’ Jenkins explains. 

His clear eagerness to throw himself into life at Yale and in New Haven echoes the deeply immersive approach he’s taken as a historian—and foreshadows his ambitious plans for future research, teaching, and cross-disciplinary collaboration on campus.

New angles on contemporary history

Jenkins’s first book, The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City (University of Chicago Press, 2021), is a meticulously researched account of municipal debt and its role in shaping the city of San Fransico. It’s characteristic of his willingness to get into the nitty gritty, technical details and primary sources that can help us understand the byzantine mechanisms of government.  

“How did the central means by which American cities raise funds for vital infrastructure—the municipal bond market—give rise to an outsize power relationship that further circumscribed the welfare state and amplified the voices of an unelected fraternity of financiers over and above city residents?” This is the core question that animated his research, and one he hopes to continue probing in future projects. 

Jenkins is currently working on two projects, both of which build upon and deepen his earlier work. The first is a comprehensive history of debt in the United States, beginning with the emergence of the US from the American Revolution through to the deficit hawkery of the present. Debt is ubiquitous, Jenkins says, and highly consequential—but surprisingly, it’s rarely been outright politicized in American life. Jenkins wanted to document distinct episodes in American history where debt has been given a political character, assigned to the ideas and pursuits of a group, and become the source of contestation. In so doing, he seeks to explore how our understanding of debt at any given moment shapes the possibilities and realities of our politics, and how debt might be politicized in our current moment for just futures. 

The second project is about the underexplored history of Black governance after the Civil Rights movement. “Once Black people were elected and appointed to government positions after the Civil Rights movement, what did they do with that power? How did they govern, and how did that mode of liberal governance clash with other forms that were antithetical to liberal institutions?” Jenkins asks. 

He plans to weave this examination of Black political influence together with an analysis of the political economy and emotions of crime—a novel approach he hopes will help readers “think about the different threads that don't neatly map on to ‘liberal,’ ‘conservative,’ ‘Democrat,’ or ‘Republican,’ among the other stale categories into which we slot Black people and Americans more generally.”

Bridging research and policymaking 

Jenkins also wants his work to have a practical impact on the world around him. 

“Sometimes I feel a little unorthodox, because I'm trained as a historian, and I'm interested in writing history,” Jenkins says. “But on the other hand, I want to produce more than solo-authored monographs and research articles.”

Jenkins hopes to contribute to practical discussions of debt policy through the creation of the “Debt Lab,” a hub for research at Yale about the history of debt, and how it shapes our politics and society. After publishing The Bonds of Inequality, he was flooded with requests from nonprofits, policymakers, and activists for help translating the book's concepts into simple language and actionable solutions. The lab would translate his work and that of colleagues and students into policy briefs and educational resources, including data visualizations, infographics, and accessible information about municipal debt.  

The Debt Lab will also connect to Jenkins’s teaching. He plans to lecture on the history of debt in America, and to offer a reoccurring lab/seminar that draws students with pre-professional goals in public policy and law, others with commitments to social justice, and still others interested in collaborative, project-based learning. Together, students will deploy rigorous historical methods to influence contemporary debates surrounding inequality in Connecticut and beyond. 

Students will produce video essays, among other innovative historical forms that incorporate archival and digital resources. “I'd like to then work with other educational platforms to distribute those video essays,” Jenkins says, “essentially allowing students to speak directly to various audiences who realize that there's something ‘going on’ with student debt or auto debt or municipal debt, but who don't have the time, resources, or energy to do the deep dive into the history.”

He hopes the lab will become a place for research associates and undergraduate students to join research clusters on debt and its relationship to topics including climate change, policing, and economic democracy. 

These broad, collective projects are sources of energy and inspiration for Jenkins. “I was drawn to Yale because of the work of esteemed colleagues across various departments who study the inequality of life chances, and work to remedy those inequities. I’m someone who benefits from being a part of an ecosystem in which folks are getting after it, doing their thing, and employing various methods to do so. I look forward to doing the same.”