Author Martha Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University, will present Bucknell’s free, public Women’s and Gender Studies Distinguished Lecture 2020 on Tuesday, March 3, at 7 p.m. in the Elaine Langone Center’s Forum.
Jones is a legal and cultural historian whose interests include the study of race, law, citizenship, slavery and the rights of women. Prior to joining the Michigan faculty, she was a public interest litigator in New York City and a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University.
Her talk will discuss a history of African American women’s politics found in her forthcoming book entitled Vanguard: How Black Women Overcame Barrier, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, to be published by Basic Book in 2020.
Jones came to the Johns Hopkins from College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan where she was a presidential bicentennial professor, professor of history, and Afroamerican and African studies. She was a founding director of the Michigan Law School Program in Race, Law & History and a senior fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows.
She is the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2018) and a co-editor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), together with many important articles and essays. Her work includes the curatorship of museum exhibitions, including “Reframing the Color Line” and “Proclaiming Emancipation” in conjunction with the William L. Clements Library.
Jones’s essays and commentary have appeared in The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, CNN, and Detroit Free Press, among other news outlets.
The event is also sponsored by Bucknell’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Gender.