Jennifer Dominique Jones

Jennifer Dominique Jones is an assistant professor of history and women's and gender studies at the University of Michigan. She completed her doctoral degree in American history at Princeton University in 2014. Prior to her appointment, she was a member of the inaugural cohort of the LSA Collegiate Fellowship. Before her appointment to the University of Michigan, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Gender & Race Studies and the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama. Her areas of research and teaching expertise are African American history after 1877, with a focus on politics and social life, and the history of gender and sexuality in the United States in the twentieth century with a focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) politics and community life. She regularly teaches the following courses: Queer Histories of the United States, 1850 to the Present, Black Queer Histories, Black Intimacies, and History of Mobility and Migrations in African American History.

Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness and Homosexuality After World War II (Justice, Power and Politics Series, University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming) illuminates a heretofore underexplored history: the unlikely tethering of political narratives about LGBTQ to understandings of Black political mobilization for social justice. Rather than focus exclusively on LGBTQ movements and spaces, this volume turns to the modern Civil Rights Movement, and the backlash to it, as important arenas where ideas about Blackness and queerness were discursively linked together. Ambivalent Affinities follows how the emergence of ideas about homosexuality shaped various political domains and actors, including civil rights organizations, Black municipal officials, segregationist advocates, white supremacists, and gay and lesbian political groups. Drawing from a wide range of primary sources, including organizational records, manuscript collections, newspaper accounts, visual and textual ephemera, and oral histories, Ambivalent Affinities traces a long, conflicting relationship between Black and Gay political identities that continues to reverberate into the present.