Jessica Marie Johnson

Jessica Marie Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University.

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Her work has appeared in Slavery & Abolition, The Black Scholar, Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism, American Quarterly, Social Text, The Journal of African American History, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Forum Journal, Bitch Magazine,Black Perspectives (AAIHS), Somatosphere and Post Colonial Digital Humanities(DHPoco).

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Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of Practicing Freedom: Black Women, Intimacy, and Kinship in New Orleans Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, under contract). She is co-editor with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) of Black Code: A Special Issue of the Black Scholar (2017), a collection of work exploring the field of Black Code Studies and editor of Slavery in the Machine: sx:archipelagos  (forthcoming). She is founding curatrix at African Diaspora, Ph.D. or #ADPhD (africandiasporaphd.com), co-organizer of the Queering Slavery Working Group with Dr. Vanessa Holden (University of Kentucky), a member of the LatiNegrxs Project (lati negros.tumblr.com), and a Digital Alchemist at the Center for Solutions to Online Violence (http://femtechnet.org/csov/).

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As a historian, Johnson researches black diasporic freedom struggles from slavery to emancipation. As a digital humanist, Johnson explores ways digital and social media disseminate and create historical narratives, in particular, comparative histories of slavery and people of African descent. She is the recipient of research fellowships and awards from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, and the Richards Civil War Era Center and Africana Research Center at the Pennsylvania State University, and the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

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Johnson tweets as @jmjafrx. Learn more about her research here and here.