Destin Jenkins is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He earned his BA in modern U.S. history from Columbia University and earned his PhD in U.S. history from Stanford University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 2017.
Jenkins’s current research centers on the linkages between the American state, racial capitalism, and the built environment. His first book, tentatively titled The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the Postwar American City, engages the paradox of municipal debt. Municipal debt became a key means by which officials in San Francisco delivered infrastructure and social services to the city’s white middle and upper class. That expansion of a broader social wage was predicated on the dispossession of black renters, regressive taxation, and the rendering of some the city’s neighborhoods unworthy of debt. All the while, bondholders were able to secure guaranteed tax-exempt interest income, effectively turning public housing projects, parks, and schools into artifacts of high federal marginal tax rates; the precursors to today’s off-shore tax-havens. A social history, The Bonds of Inequality explores how debt became a constraint on democratic state power. He is co-editing a volume, with Justin Leroy, tentatively titled The Old History of Capitalism, for Columbia University Press.
Jenkins’s broader academic interests include American political development, the illicit economy, uneven development, empire, and, increasingly, the environment. He has written for Process: A Blog for American History, and Public Books, where he also edits the capitalism series.