Jacob A. Zumoff, Ph.D.

• Ph.D., History, University College London, 2003  
• B.A., History, Rutgers University, 1997

Dr. Zumoff has taught courses in United States, Latin America, European, and World History, from introductory survey courses to the senior research course. In particular, he has taught courses on Mexico; Cuba and Puerto Rico; the Dominican Republic and Haiti; U.S. foreign relations; and U.S. social and political history.

Dr. Zumoff is primarily interested in the intersection of the labor movement, left-wing politics, culture and race and ethnicity in the interwar years in the Americas. In particular, he has published on the history of Communism in the Americas; the labor movement, race, and anti-imperialism in Latin America and the Greater Caribbean; black radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s; and the politics of mystery novelist Dashiell Hammett. He has published peer-reviewed articles in journals such as The Americas; International Review of Social History; Journal of Caribbean History; Journal of Social History; Journal for the Study of Radicalism; and Labour/Le Travail. His books include, The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929 (Brill, 2014), based on records in Moscow archives; Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike (Rutgers, 2021), the only study of this seminal New Jersey strike; and the co-edited volume, Transnational Communism Across the Americas (Illinois, 2023), a cutting edge collection of essays reflecting the “transnational turn” in the study of Latin American Communism. He is currently working on a history of the International Labor Defense, the social and legal defense arm of the Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s, and a history of the relationship of West Indian migration and anti-imperialism in Panamanian working-class history in the interwar period.