Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University
About
Professor Martha S. Jones joined the Johns Hopkins University Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Department of History on June 1, 2017. She came from the University of Michigan 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. Professor Jones is a legal and cultural historian whose interests include the study of race, law, citizenship, slavery, and the rights of women. She holds a PhD in history from Columbia University and a JD from the CUNY School of Law. 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.
Professor Jones 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 coeditor 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. Professor Jones's essays and commentary have appeared in the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, CNN, and the Detroit Free Press, among other news outlets.
Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the National Constitution Center, and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History. Today, Professor Jones serves as co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and was recently elected to the Organization of American Historians executive board. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland and Paris, France with her husband, historian Jean Hébrard.
Current Work:
Professor Jones's book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, is forthcoming in 2018 from Cambridge University Press. Birthright citizenship, set in place by the 14th amendment, still determines who is a United States citizen today. How birthright came to be is a story about African American ideas about belonging and about the activism it took to make those ideas come to life. For too long, a single Supreme Court case — Dred Scott v. Sandford — has been left to tell this story. Birthright Citizens looks beyond Dred Scott to understand how, even as many doubted their rights, Black Americans worked through conventions, the press, and in their local courthouse to establish a principle that would guarantee them the right to remain in the United States as full members of the body politic. Set in Baltimore, Maryland, this book turns established history on its head, following Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott, to his home city. It reveals Baltimore's local black activists, rather than the chief justice, were responsible for developing a new and enduring view of citizenship that would not only guarantee to them but would guarantee to all those born in the United States the rights of citizens.
Research Area Keyword(s):
History, African Americans, law, racism, slavery
