Martha S. Jones - Department of History, Johns Hopkins University

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today's discussion is with Martha Jones, who is Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She has written extensively about Atlantic world history, African American cultural and political history, and race and citizenship. She is the author of a number of books, including Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, and All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900. In this conversation, we discuss the place of history in Black Studies, the emerging importance of memoir work in the field, and the significance of her new work The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir.