Jennifer Dominique Jones

Jennifer Dominique Jones is an Associate Professor of History and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Her areas of research and teaching expertise are Black Queer History, Black Feminist History, 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, Black Queer Histories, Black Intimacies, the History of Sexuality and Feminist Methods.

She is the author of Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness and Homosexuality After World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Ambivalent Affinities was a finalist for the 2024 LGBTQ+ Studies Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation (for the best academic book in LGBTQ+ Studies) and received an honorable mention for the 2024 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians (for the best book in the history of race relations). This study 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, this study traces a long, conflicting relationship between Black and Gay political identities that continues to reverberate into the present. 

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.