Nicholas R. Jones

Nicholas R. Jones's picture
Associate Professor Tenure
Ph.D. New York University
nicholas.jones@yale.edu
Nicholas R. Jones, a Tenured professor at Yale University, is the former King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center’s Scholar-in-Residence at New York University (2021-2022). Jones’s latest single-authored book, Cervantine Blackness (Penn State UP, Nov 2024), presents a searing work of literary criticism and political debate that speaks to specialists and nonspecialists alike—anyone with a serious interest in Cervantes’s work who takes seriously a critical reckoning with the cultural, historical, and literary legacies of agency, antiblackness, and refusal within the Iberian Peninsula and the global reaches of its empire. 
 
Additionally, among his numerous publications, Jones authored the award-winning book Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State, May 2019) and has guest edited two monographic-length special issues on Black Performance, Critical Black Studies, and Black Temporalities in sub-Saharan Africa featured in the Bulletin of the Comediantes and La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, & Cultures. Most recently, he has published The Routledge Companion to Race in Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production (May 2025), co-edited with Christina H. Lee and Dominique E. Polanco. Forthcoming and in-production publications of his include Cervantine Futures (Vanderbilt UP) with Paul Michael Johnson and The Renaissance Reader: Beyoncé & Black Queer Popular Culture with Kinitra D. Brooks.
 
Cervantine Blackness:
 
“On Reparation and Recovery,” Guest Editor Introduction to Recovering Black Performance in Early Modern Iberia: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/107/article/928894.
 
“Black Bibliophiles, Black Collectors: Or, How to Write about Blackness in Medieval Iberia.” https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/114/article/961707.