Jeannette Eileen Jones, is a historian of the United States, with particular emphasis in American cultural and intellectual history and African American Studies, with strong interests in race and representation, Atlantic studies, and science studies. Her research reflects my desire to contribute to the larger critical conversations taking place in these fields, specifically around the role of race in shaping American cultural and intellectual discourse and production. More precisely, my research examines the ways in which “race” as a popular and scientific category operated as a potent signifier of difference—cultural, biological, social, and political—in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. However, recognizing the rising global significance of race as an organizing principle, as well as the transnational migration of ideas about race during this period (roughly the Gilded Age to the end of Word War II), my research extends across the Atlantic. It seeks to uncover the discursive relationship between America, other Western, and “subaltern” perspectives on imperialism, citizenship, and social belonging, as mediated primarily through the lens of race, but also through those of gender (ideas about femininity and masculinity), and sexuality.
