2021/2022 

Nick Jones

Image from Nick Jones

Scholar-in-Residence

Fall 2021 - Spring 2022



The KJCC congratulates our scholar-in-residence Dr. Nicholas R. Jones on his appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and an Affiliate in the Program in Early Modern Studies at Yale University. We look forward to future collaborations with him and the Department.

Jones (UC Davis) is author of the prize-winning Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, May 2019) and co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave, December 2018) and Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production (Routledge, January 2021) with Chad Leahy. Jones also co-edits the Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities book series with Derrick Higginbotham and is the new Editor-in-Chief of Caribbeana: The Journal of the Early Caribbean Society. Jones has held visiting appointments at Georgetown University and New York University and has published widely in journals such as Colonial Latin American Review, Hispanic Review, University of Toronto Quarterly, among others.

Jones’s residency will chart and uncover the conception, legacy, and porousness of Iberian Blackness–archival, performative, visual–across time (but primarily throughout early modernity). His residency will culminate in a two-day conference supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities on how the Atlantic slave trade and resulting African diaspora shaped Iberia’s “Golden Age” of theater. Diverse modes of Black performance enriched this quintessentially early modern entertainment as it took shape in Portugal and Spain on the Iberian Peninsula. This theater also thrived across the Atlantic as these two maritime empires extended their reach. To explore this topic in depth, Jones and his co-convenor Elizabeth Wright, Editor-in-Chief of Bulletin of the Comediantes, will bring together nineteen scholars from North America, Europe, and Latin America to present papers at New York University’s King Juan Carlos I Center on April 29-30, 2022, will be free and open to the public. After going through peer review, papers will be published in the Bulletin of the Comediantes (volume 75, no. 1 & 2, 2023), reaching a worldwide audience through print and online editions.

To learn more about KJCC Scholar-in-Residence Nicholas Jones’s work, visit these links:

https://www.aaihs.org/top-10-of-2018-9-the-legacy-and-representation-of-blacks-in-spain/

https://www.publicbooks.org/whose-spanish-anyway/

https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-nicholas-joness-staging-habla-de-negros-radical-performances-african-diaspora-early


Past Scholar-in-Residence:

Mary Ann Newman