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
Professor Jones teaches 20th and 21st century African American cultural production. She specializes in visual studies and photography, space and place, and Black feminist criticism. Her writing on Black visual culture has been published in Aperture, Souls, Callaloo, Southern Cultures, and MCA Chicago. Her current project, The Last Thanksgiving at West Rutland Square, blends family history, spatial study, and visual archives to resurface Black life in Boston’s South End in the wake of displacement. She is also at work on a visual and architectural study of Black women’s rooming houses, exploring how these sites–and their contemporary traces–materialize and memorialize Black feminist world-building in the early twentieth century. Professor Jones is the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the Provost's Fellows Program at Dartmouth College. She holds her PhD and MA from Harvard University and BA from Emory University.
Publications
Articles, Essays, and Reviews
- "Review of Flint is Family in Three Acts," Aperture (2022) forthcoming
- “Walking with Ella: Photography, Interiority, and the Spiritual Church Movement,” Southern Cultures 28, no. 2 (Summer 2022) forthcoming
- “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.