Affiliated Institutions

Columbia University

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, where I am affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Research in African American Studies. I am also Managing Editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. In Fall 2014, I will join Yale University's faculty as Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. I earned my Ph.D. from the joint program in Anthropology and French Studies at New York University. As a political anthropologist, I specialize in the study of gender and sexuality in the African diaspora. My ethnographic research focuses on the intersections of sexual and environmental politics and their relationship to debates about sovereignty in the (French) Caribbean. Outside of academe I am the former coordinator of Oakland's Prison Activist Resource Center and the former Board Chair of New York City's Audre Lorde Project.

Areas of Research

gender/sexuality, environment, pesticides/toxicity

Publications

Agard-Jones, Vanessa. Bodies in the System. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, November 2013 Volume 17 Issue 3.

Agard-Jones, Vanessa. What the Sands Remember. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2012 Volume 18, Number 2-3: 325-346.

Agard-Jones, Vanessa. Le Jeu de Qui? Sexual Politics at Play in the French Caribbean. Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, 2009. Reprinted in Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (Faith Smith, ed.), University of Virginia Press, 2011.

Agard-Jones, Vanessa and Manning Marable, eds. Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Projects

Martinique

I'm currently writing a book about pesticides, (sexual) politics, and postcoloniality in Martinique, a French territory in the Caribbean. Because the island is at once French and American, the project is trans-local in scope.

France

I'm currently writing a book about pesticides, (sexual) politics, and postcoloniality in Martinique, a French territory in the Caribbean. Because the island is at once French and American, the project is trans-local in scope.