Esther L. Jones, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, English, Clark University

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Associate Professor English; E. Franklin Frazier Chair of African American Literature, Theory, and Culture; Inaugural Director of Africana Studies, Clark University, Worcester, MA. Jones specializes in the study of black women writers in Africa and the diaspora, with a focus on the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality. She has a particular interest in speculative literatures and science fiction by feminists and writers of color, and how such texts attempt to theorize difference. Her book, Medicine and Ethics in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (2015 Palgrave MacMillan series in Literature, Science, and Medicine) explores these concerns by examining the historical constructions of black pathology in medicine. She argues that science fiction is an especially apt space for imagining a cultural bioethics that resists dominant narratives about black female pathology and embodied difference. Focusing specifically on the raced and gendered constructions of difference within the medical establishment, she highlights how black women science fiction writers theorize questions of ethics, empathy, and the politics of difference within medicine.

Medicine and ethics in literature; Black women (African, Caribbean, African American) ane health disparities; Black health; African indigenous healing practices; bioethics in speculative fiction and science fiction

Publications

Coming soon!