Jessica Marie Johnson

Jessica Marie Johnson is an Assistant Professor of History at Michigan State University. Her research interests include histories of slavery and the slave trade; women, gender, and sexuality in the African diaspora; and digital history and new media and has appeared in Slavery & Abolition and Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism.

In 2008, she founded African Diaspora, Ph.D., a blog highlighting scholars and scholarship in the field of Atlantic African diaspora history. Johnson continues to make media as a member of the LatiNegrxs Project and the Queering Slavery Working Group which she co-organizes with Vanessa Holden (Michigan State).

Johnson has two works in progress. One is a history of free women of African descent laboring, living, and traveling between eighteenth-century Senegal, Saint-Domingue, and Gulf Coast Louisiana. 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. She was recently named a 2015-2016 Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar in the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia. She tweets as @jmjafrx.