Douglas A Jones Jr.

Douglas Jones has wide-ranging interests in (African) American literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, political theory, and the history of ideas. He is at work on two book projects. One is an intellectual history of black personhood, its ontology and its physiology, from the early modern era until c. 1800. Tentatively titled "After Caliban: Black Personhood in Anglo-American Thought from Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson," it studies a range of literary, medical, philosophical, art visual, cartographic, historiographic, theological, economic, political, and (quasi) ethnographic texts to trace notions of black personhood (Homo Africanus) from the beginnings of England's participation in the transatlantic slave trade and New World colonization through the founding of the United States of America. The second project is a biography of the great contralto Marian Anderson, "Voice of the Century: Marian Anderson, A Life of Art and Activism." The first major biography of Anderson for the general public, "Voice of the Century" will be published by W.W. Norton & Company.

Professor Jones' new book, Pragmatics of Democracy: A Political Theory of African American Literature before Emancipation (Chicago), reads democracy as modern "slave morality" par excellence (Nietzsche), and proposes a typology of bodily events that disposes persons toward democratic subjectivity: ecstasy, impersonality, respectability, violence, and care. He is also the author of The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Michigan) and editor or co-editor of three books, including a new collection of the writings of political philosopher Maria W. Stewart (Oxford). His writing has appeared in major scholarly journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, and Theatre Journal, as well as public venues such as The New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement (UK). Professor Jones is a long-time faculty member of the Bread Loaf School of English, where he has held the Frank and Eleanor Griffiths Chair, and is a former fellow of the Princeton Society of Fellows.

He is represented by Elias Altman at Massie, McQuilken, & Altman.