Justin Jones

Justin P. Jones is a second year PhD student working under the direction of Jane Landers and Brandon Byrd. His research interests focus on the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolutions, and particularly on issues of migration, refugees, slavery, and the law, associated with the Haitian Revolution, and how these factors created and maintained connections between the United States, the Caribbean, and South America.

Jones is also very interested in the digital humanities, particularly the use of GIS for tracking migrations. He is currently a researcher in the Slave Societies Digital Archive, where he is working on a project using digital methods to analyze ecclesiastical records of Fort Mose, the first free Black settlement in Florida.

Jones earned a Bachelor’s degree in History and Spanish, with a minor in Portuguese from the University of Pittsburgh in 2022. While there, he also worked as a journalist and a writer on the podcast Dialogues in Afro-Latinidad, hosted by Professor Michele Reid-Vazquez.

He is currently a FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) Fellow, continuing his studies of Portuguese. He has presented his work on refugees associated with the Haitian Revolution at several conferences, including Phi Alpha Theta and Vanderbilt’s Circum-Atlantic Seminar.