Nicholas Jones

Nicholas R. Jones explores the agency, subjectivity, and performance of Black diasporic identities in early modern Iberia and the Ibero-Atlantic world. In doing so, his work enlists the strategies, methodologies, and insights of Black Studies into the service of Early Modern Studies and vice versa. To that end, Jones's scholarly and teaching interests re-imagine the lives of early African diasporic people via the global circulation of material goods, visual culture, and ideological forms represented in archival documents and literature from West-Central Africa, Iberia, and the Americas. He is author of Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State UP, May 2019) and co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave, December 2018) with Cassander L. Smith and Miles P. Grier. Jones is also co-editor of the Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities book series with Derrick Higginbotham and has published widely in peer-reviewed venues such as Hispanic Review, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, and University of Toronto Quarterly. Currently, he's at work on two new books entitled: Black Whores, Jet Beauties: Early Modern Iberian Black Women and the Politics of Material Culture and Cervantine Blackness.