Growing up in mid-Michigan, with the majority of her family residing in a city called Albion, Jennifer Dominique Jones was surrounded by people who frequently talked about their family history. Her forebearers were southern migrants who moved to Michigan in the early to mid-20th century to labor in factories. Jones recalls her family talking about a wide range of moments in their history, including moving from the south, inequality, community solidarity, and institution-building. When she began taking history courses in high school and college she was able to see how her family’s history both neatly and not so neatly fell in line with dominant narratives in African-American history. As a senior at the University of Michigan, she took an introduction to women’s studies course where she was first exposed to Black queer history. These formative experiences informed her decision to pursue a career as a historian.
As a graduate student at Princeton, Jones expected there to be a large historiography about Black queer history but found this wasn’t the case. From there on, she began developing a dissertation project which culminated in her first book, Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness and Homosexuality after World War II. The project was a blending of her interests in who African-American liberals think should be included in a broader political vision, who should be excluded, and why. Her current research continues in this tradition, thinking critically about how Black queer individuals and histories are obscured and what this means for narratives of African-American history, Black queer history, and Black feminist thought.
Jones’ current project at the Institute is a study of Ann Allen Shockley. Jones describes Shockley as a former librarian and archivist at Fisk University with a robust multi-genre writing career (nonfiction, fiction, short stories, newspaper columns). This writing career includes Loving Her (1974), which is the first published fiction novel featuring a Black lesbian protagonist.
Despite this large volume of work, Jones noticed that Black feminist studies scholars had not given adequate attention to Shockley’s intellectual contributions. As an ambivalent biographer, Jones views her project as a vehicle to answer critical questions about the emergence of Black feminist studies as an interdisciplinary academic field. This includes who we choose to remember and how our own value systems operate within Black feminist thought.
So far, Jones has taken a specific methodological approach to her research on Shockley. Because Shockley does not have a manuscript collection, Jones is casting a wide net and trying to piece together material from various archives based on places she worked, people she collaborated with, and presses and journals where she published. This process is not too different from her approach during the research of her first book when she often encountered archives which appeared to have little to no material on Black queer history. However, by searching the collections for various references to sexual non-normativity she found relevant material.
Jones does not view this challenge as limiting. She believes that the joys of archival research lie both in finding the one material that you need and also material surrounding your topic, which help flesh out the worldview of the subjects and organizations she is researching. As an interdisciplinary Black feminist historian, she seeks to explore and expand what counts as Black queer history.
Jennifer Dominique Jones is a 2025-26 Jean Yokes Woodhead Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Associate Professor of History and Women's and Gender Studies.
Adesewa Ojo is a 2025-26 Public Humanities Intern at the Institute for the Humanities in her fourth year, majoring in History.
