English Department Faculty
Jovonna Jones
Assistant Professor, English and African & African Diaspora Studies
Jovonna Jones
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes S483
Email: jonesame@bc.edu
Education
- B.A., Emory University
- M.A., Harvard University
- P.hD., Harvard University
Department
Biography
Jovonna Jones is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Culture at Boston College, specializing in visual culture, Black feminisms, and the built environment. Her articles have appeared in Aperture, Boston Art Review, Callaloo, Souls, and Southern Cultures, along with essays in Fragments of a Crucifixion (MCA Chicago), Picturing Black History (Abrams Books), and LaToya M. Hobbs: Carving Out Time (Harvard Art Museums). Her first book project, The Last Thanksgiving at West Rutland Square, blends family history and visual archives to re-examine Black space-making and spatial activism in Boston’s South End. Prof. Jones is a 2026 Sharing Community Histories fellow at the Northeastern Humanities Center with a focus on creative archival writing and pedagogy. She was a 2024-2025 ACLS Fellow, and a 2024-2025 resident fellow at the Newhouse Center for Humanities at Wellesley College. She has previously held fellowships from Dartmouth College, the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Prof. Jones holds her PhD and MA from Harvard University and BA from Emory University, each in African American Studies.
Publications
Articles, Essays, and Reviews
- “Introduction” in LaToya M. Hobbs: Carving Out Time. Edited by Elizabeth M. Rudy, Harvard Art Museums, 2025.
- “A Rooming House for Transient Girls: Tracing Black Women’s Spatial Vision in the Black Metropolis,” Southern Cultures (Sojourning, Summer 2024)
- “Developing a Movement: How the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement Used Printed Matter to Protest Apartheid,” Boston Art Review, Issue 12 (Spring/Summer 2024)
- “Making and Mobilizing Art in Times of War,” in Edmeier, Daniela, et al. Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories That Changed the World. Harry N. Abrams, 2024.
- “Walking with Ella: Photography, Interiority, and the Spiritual Church Movement,” Southern Cultures 28, no. 2 (Sanctuary, Summer 2022)
- “Flint is Family in Three Acts by LaToya Ruby Frazier (Review).” Aperture Magazine, issue 248, p. 158.
- “Troubling Dignity, Seeking Truth: Black Feminist Vision and the Thought-World of Black Photography in the Nineteenth Century,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 22, issue 1. Pp. 32-43.
- “A Visual Record of Black Lives, Four Decades After Emancipation: a new book revisits W.E.B. Du Bois’s landmark 1900 exhibition on Black American Identity,” Aperture.com, April 24, 2020. online
- “Untitled 54 by Lorna Simpson (Review).” Aperture PhotoBook Review, issue 016, p. 18.
- “Daufuskie Island by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (Review).” Aperture PhotoBook Review, issue 018 (2020), p.11.
- “Now Found: On Faith and Wonderment in Deana Lawson’s Messier 81, Return of the Dove.” in Fragments of a Crucifixion, ed. by Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2019. online
- “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart (Review).” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 143, no. 2, 2019, pp. 226-228.
- “Look, Look. Look: The Work of Black Aesthetics in Toni Morrison’s Jazz,” Callaloo 41:2 (2018), pp. 93-104.
- “Souls Against the Concrete by Khalik Allah (Review).” Aperture PhotoBook Review, issue 014, p. 23.
- “Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death by Courtney R. Baker (Review).” Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 2017, p. 324.