Jessica Marie Johnson
Founder/Curatrix

Jessica Marie Johnson is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University. Her research interests include women, gender, and sexuality in the African diaspora; histories of slavery and the slave trade; and digital history and new media.

As a digital humanist, Johnson is interested in ways digital and social media disseminate and create historical narratives, in particular, comparative histories of slavery and people of African descent. She has two works in progress. One is a history of free women of African descent laboring, living, and traveling between Senegal, Saint-Domingue and Gulf Coast Louisiana in the eighteenth century. The second, in collaboration with Mark Anthony Neal, is a compilation of work reading nineteenth-century black codes against present-day race coding and digital vernaculars of people of African descent. In 2008, she founded African Diaspora, Ph.D., a blog highlighting scholars and scholarship in the field of Atlantic African diaspora history.

Johnson holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in history from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a B.A. in African & African American Studies from Washington University in St. Louis where she was also a Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellow.  Between 2009 and 2011, she was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow in the Africana Studies Program at Bowdoin College.

Johnson can be reached via email and is most active on Tumblr and Twitter.  Click here for more information on her or to explore her work.