Martha S. Jones

Martha Jones is a writer, historian, legal scholar and public intellectual whose work aims to understanding the politics, culture, and poetics of Black America. Her latest book – The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir (2025) – recounts her family’s encounters with race and color through the story of five generations. She is the author of prize-winning histories that survey the vast American past, from slavery and the founding, the Civil War and Reconstruction, women’s suffrage and Jim Crow, on through modern Civil Rights and present day race and identity, including Vanguard: How Black Women Broker Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, and Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America.

For the New York Times, she has written on culture and travel; her opinion columns have appeared in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Politico, Talking Points Memo, and USA Today. You can see and hear her outlets such as NPR’s Here & Now and 1A, CNN’s Amanpour, and MSNBC’s the Rachel Maddow Show and podcasts such as the Ezra Klein Show and the 19th*’s Amendment.

Her work has enjoyed generous recognition including book prizes from the American Historical Association, the Organization for American History, the American Society for Legal History, and the Los Angeles Times and fellowships Berlin’s Institute for Advance Study, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Library of Congress Kluge Center, and the American Historical Association. She was most recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Jones teaches for the Department of History and the SNF Agora Institute and is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor. She also directs the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project where my lab investigates the history of slavery and racism connected with Johns Hopkins University and Medicine.