Maryjane Johnson graduated with honors from Manhattanville College with a Bachelor of Arts in History and Secondary Education with a concentration in Social Studies Education. Her undergraduate thesis, titled “Anti-Semitism, Nativism, and the American Response to the Holocaust,” explored factors that influenced the passage of the restrictive immigration policy of the 20th century.
At Columbia and the LSE, Maryjane continued her studies of American immigration history and wrote her graduate dissertation on Italian contract labor in the late nineteenth century, American immigration policy, and labor relations. Her dissertation examined how Italian contract labor challenged American free labor ideology and racialized notions of free and unfree labor by analyzing American immigration legislation, global immigration investigations, and transnational collaborations between Italy and the United States aimed at thwarting contract labor.
Currently, Maryjane works at The Brennan Center for Justice, a legal advocacy nonprofit and think tank. As a Program Associate in the Democracy Program, she researches and writes on the use of history in the Supreme Court, and she collaborates with historians, legal scholars, and lawyers to promote new ways of using history in constitutional interpretation.
