Douglas A. Jones Jr.
Douglas A. Jones, Jr. holds a joint Ph.D. in Drama and Humanities from Stanford University, where his dissertation, “The ‘Common Sense’ of Slavery: Race, Performance, and a ‘Peculiar’ America, 1817-1861,” won the Wendell Cole Memorial Prize for Distinguished Dissertation. This study forms the core of his book manuscript, which considers how proslavery ideology conditioned the social, political, and cultural landscapes of the post-slavery north in the decades before the Civil War. This project reflects Jones’ broader research interests, namely, the cultural and literary history of the early national and antebellum United States, 19th and 20th century African American literature, the cultural history and historiography of slavery, publics, and theories of race and performance. In these areas, he has published a number of journal articles, reviews, and essays in edited collections. His most recent publication, “An Ambivalent Beginning: Slavery, Performance, and the Design of African American Theatre,” is the opening essay in the forthcoming collection, The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre (Harvey Young, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2012). Jones has delivered a wide range of scholarly talks at national and regional conferences as well as given invited lectures at a number of universities. At Stanford, he earned several fellowships and grants for his scholarly work and his teaching and mentorship there was recognized with a Service Award to Undergraduate Life. In 2011-2012, he will teach an upper-level seminar in the fall, “The Drama of Making America: Staging Race from the Revolution to the Civil War,” and a Freshman Seminar in the spring, “Slavery and American Culture.” Jones is also the Resident Faculty Fellow of Wilson College at Princeton.