Justin Wolfe is an Associate Professor of History at Tulane University and a scholar of Latin America whose work focuses on race, nation, and empire, particularly in nineteenth-century Central America. He has spent much of his career trying to understand how large abstractions like race, liberalism, and empire were actually experienced and contested in people’s everyday lives. His first book, “The Everyday Nation-State,” examined that process in nineteenth-century Nicaragua; his current project, “On Equal Grounds: Race and Empire in the Age of Manifest Destiny,” centers on Greytown, Nicaragua, a cosmopolitan Caribbean port town where, in the early 1850s, people of African descent helped create a hothouse experiment in multiracial political equality that challenged the racial and imperial hierarchies of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.

During his week at A Studio in the Woods, Wolfe will work on the book’s introduction and narrative voice, bringing the people, conflicts, and social world of Greytown to life for a wider audience.

Photo credit: Paula Burch