Jonathan is the author of Freedom Soldiers, a history of enlisted freedom seekers who fought for liberation in the camps, courts, and prisons of the US Army during the Civil War

He earned his PhD at Brown University and teaches at Purdue University. Before joining Purdue, he was the Brown University-Tougaloo College Exchange Faculty Fellow and the Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellow at New-York Historical Society and the New School.

He is the recipient of the Allan Nevins Dissertation Prize (Society of American Historians), the Cromwell Dissertation Prize (American Society for Legal History), the Du Bois-Wells Paper Prize (African American Intellectual History Society), and the William F. Holmes Paper Prize (Southern Historical Association). He also received Brown University’s Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching (2018), an award he was nominated for by students from Brown and Tougaloo.

He has published peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of African American History, Journal of American Ethnic History, and Civil War History. His work has also been published by the Washington Post. He has been a research fellow at, among other institutions, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harvard University, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition of Yale University.

He has delivered papers on his research at meetings of organizations including the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association. C-SPAN aired his talk on formerly enslaved men who deserted the US Army. It can be viewed here.