Faculty Fellow

Biography

Benjamin Justice is Distinguished Professor of Education at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education and an associate member of the History Department at Rutgers—New Brunswick. He holds a courtesy appointment as Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. He also serves series editor of New Directions in History of Education, at Rutgers University Press. Dr. Justice is past president of the History of Education Society, and a former member of the Standing Committee on American History for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Currently Dr. Justice examines the ways in which the US criminal justice system educates. This work builds innovative connections between legitimacy theory and curriculum theory, positing that criminal justice is, itself, a form of civic education. Dr. Justice spent the 2023-24 academic year as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, writing a book on how experiences with police, courts, and pre-trial detention offer formal and hidden curricula that shape civic identity. Over his career, Dr. Justice has produced scholarship that is wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, appearing in journals in education, history, law, social science, and philosophy, as well as in mainstream periodicals, radio, and tv. His book, The War That Wasn’t: Religious Conflict and Compromise in the Common Schools of New York State, 1865-1900, provides a social history of the micropolitics of religion in public schools. In Have a Little Faith: Religion, Democracy, and the American Public School (coauthored with Colin MacLeod), he looks at tensions between public education and democratic ideals from historical and contemporary perspectives. He is also editor of The Founding Fathers, Education, and the Great Contest, which examines educational ideas in the early American Republic, and the methods by which historians uncover them.

Dr. Justice is the winner of numerous honors and awards, such as the AESA Critics Choice Book Award, the Outstanding Scholarly Publication on Justice in Education Award from the AERA Philosophical Studies in Education SIG, the AERA Outstanding Reviewer Award, A National Academy of Education/Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation’s Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, the NY State Archives/NY Department of Education/State University of New York Researcher of the Year, and awards in service, teaching, and research from Rutgers University and the Graduate School of Education. Dr. Justice holds a B.A. (history) from Yale, and M.A. (history) and Ph.D. (Education) from Stanford University.

Fellowship Project

Democracy Comics: Bridging the Academic Knowledge Gap leverages the genre of the graphic novel to bring serious scholarship from multiple disciplines to bear on an issue at the heart of American social policy and politics—seeking to understand a civic issue that young adults care about and producing a high-quality, non-partisan, engaging graphic novel to inform debates on that issue.

The project builds on a pilot, titled Space Wager, sponsored by the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School and published in their annual journal, The Notebook. Supporting the theme of “solidarities,” Space Wager is a ten-page graphic novel about two well-meaning aliens (one a little more liberal, one a little more conservative) who are puzzled by the paradox of racial inequality in the US: that the law is colorblind but the inequality by race endures. For the Fellowship project, “Comics for Democracy,” Dr. Justice seeks to develop another graphic novel with those same goals, but targeting a younger, less literate audience through an iterative process of student focus group and production. 

This project leverages the genre of the graphic novel to bring serious scholarship from multiple disciplines to bear on an issue at the heart of American social policy and politics—seeking to understand a civic issue that young adults care about and producing a high-quality, non-partisan, engaging graphic novel to inform debates on that issue.