Jovonna Jones is a writer and cultural historian from Greater Boston.
She is an Assistant Professor of English and African & African Diaspora Studies at Boston College, specializing in visual culture, Black feminisms, and the built environment. Her articles have appeared in Aperture, Boston Art Review, Callaloo, Souls, and Southern Cultures, along with essays in Fragments of a Crucifixion (MCA Chicago), Picturing Black History (Abrams Books), and LaToya M. Hobbs: Carving Out Time (Harvard Art Museums). Her book manuscript, The Last Thanksgiving at West Rutland Square, tells a story of neighborhood takeover through the intimate lens of a displaced resident: her late grandmother Mary Brown. Brown’s legal battle over an historic brownstone building in Boston’s South End opens a window into Black residents’ twentieth-century community formation and fracture in the shadow of urban growth.
Currently, Jovonna is a Scholar-in-Residence at Embrace Boston. Previously, she was a 2026 Sharing Community Histories fellow at the Northeastern Humanities Center. She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Newhouse Center for Humanities, the Dartmouth Provost’s Fellows Program, the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Jovonna holds her PhD and MA from Harvard University and BA from Emory University, each in African American Studies.
Selected Writing
“A Rooming House for Transient Girls: Black Women’s Spatial Vision in the Black Metropolis” in Southern Cultures
“Making and Mobilizing Art in Times of War” in Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories that Changed the World (Abrams Books)
“Developing a Movement: How the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement Used Printed Matter to Protest Apartheid” in Boston Art Review
“Walking with Ella: Photography, Interiority, and the Spiritual Church Movement in the Work of Gordon Parks” in Southern Cultures
“Flint is Family in Three Acts by LaToya Ruby Frazier (Review)” in Aperture
“Troubling Dignity, Seeking Truth: Black Feminist Vision and the Thought-World of Black Photography in the Nineteenth Century” in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
“A Visual Record of Black Lives, Four Decades After Emancipation” on Aperture.org
“Now Found: On Faith and Wonderment in Deana Lawson’s Messier 81, Return of the Dove” in Fragments of a Crucifixion (MCA Chicago)
“look, look. look: The Work of Black Aesthetics in Toni Morrison’s Jazz” in Callaloo
“Energy Charts and Cosmic Light: Working between portraiture and documentary, Khalik Allah’s new book tracks Harlem by night” in Aperture Photobook Review 014
