Ebony Jones

Bio

I was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I worked as a Licensed Practical Nurse for ten years before deciding on graduate school in the humanities. I studied history at New York University. I completed my Ph.D. in 2017 and was a 2015-17 Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. During the spring of 2021, I was a fellow at the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slave Trade at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. For the 2021-22 academic year, I was a long-term research fellow at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Research Publications

“‘[S]old to any one [sic] who would buy them’: Convict Transportation and the Intercolonial Slave from Jamaica after 1807,” The Journal of Global Slavery, Vol. 7, Issues 1-2 (March 2022), pp 103-129.

“Slavery and the Slave Trade,” co-authored with Jennifer Morgan for A Companion to American Women’s History, 2d ed. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing (2020)

Book Review of Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childbearing, and Slavery in Jamaica, for Agricultural History Society, Vol. 93, No. 2 (Spring 2019), pp. 358-359.

Area(s) of Expertise

My research and teaching interests are in the histories of Atlantic world slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, and imperial crime and punishment. My current manuscript in progress: "Slavery’s Dangerous Characters: Punishment and Black Mobile Existence in Jamaica’s Atlantic World" (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press) explores the use of transportation as a form of discipline and punishment for enslaved women and men convicted and sentenced by slave courts in the British Caribbean and subsequently sold and removed to British Honduras, Spanish Florida, and Cuba. "Slavery's Dangerous Characters" critically examines how this punishment used by colonial officials as a means of control and aspirational deterrence was never absolute, as the enslaved maintained and adjusted their daily politics in the wake of their removal from the island to seemingly “foreign” regions.