Douglas A Jones Jr.

Douglas Jones has wide-ranging interests in (African) American literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, performance studies, and political theory. His forthcoming book "Pragmatics of Democracy: A Political Theory of African American Literature before Emancipation" (University of Chicago Press) 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. 

Jones is the author of The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (2014) and editor or co-editor of four books, including a new collection of the writings of political philosopher Maria W. Stewart (Oxford University Press 2024). His essays have appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, Theatre Journal, and elsewhere. He sits on the editorial boards of American Literature, Modern Drama, and Duke University Press. 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 and McQuilken and is writing a biography of the great contralto Marian Anderson that will be published by Norton.

Fall 2023 Semester:

Tuesdays 10:30 – noon and by appointment. (Page 109G - West Campus)