Rate My Professor Jason Resnikoff

Jason Resnikoff is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen. He earned his PhD in History from Columbia University in 2019, with a dissertation entitled “The Misanthropic Sublime: Automation and the Meaning of Work in the Post-War United States,” supervised by Casey Blake, Alice Kessler-Harris, Robert Amdur, Elizabeth Blackmar, and Nelson Lichtenstein. He also holds an MA (2014) and MPhil (2015) from Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude from Columbia College in 2008, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa early and received the Garrett Mattingly Prize and the Chanler Historical Prize for his senior thesis. Prior to his current position, which began in Fall 2022, Resnikoff served as Lecturer in Columbia University's History Department from Fall 2019 to Spring 2022 and as Instructor teaching Contemporary Civilization through Columbia's Center for Justice Justice-in-Education Initiative at Taconic Correctional Facility in Fall 2018. He holds a Certificate in Inclusive Teaching from Columbia's Center for Teaching and Learning (Fall 2019).

Resnikoff's research centers on the history of labor and technology, history of capitalism, US history, and intellectual history. His book Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work was published by the University of Illinois Press in the Working-Class in American History Series. Key peer-reviewed articles include “Whence Automation? The History (and Possible Futures) of a Concept,” co-authored with Salem Elzway in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History (2024); “Contesting the Idea of Progress: Labor’s AI Challenge” in the same journal (2024); “The Myth of Black Obsolescence” in International Labor and Working-Class History (2022); and “The Paradox of Automation: QWERTY and The Neuter Keyboard” in Labor (2021), which won the Best Article Prize for the most outstanding article in Labor for 2020/2021. He has contributed to public outlets such as the Washington Post (“AI Won't Kill Our Jobs--But It Will Make Them Worse,” 2023) and Jacobin. Resnikoff has presented at conferences including the Labor and Working-Class History Association, Society for the History of Technology, and Society for US Intellectual History, addressing topics like automation ideologies, labor narratives, and technological impacts on work.