Vanessa Agard-Jones is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Columbia University's Society of Fellows in the Humanities. A political anthropologist specializing in the study of gender and sexuality in the African diaspora, her ethnographic research focuses on the intersections of sexual and environmental politics and their relationship to debates about sovereignty in the (French) Caribbean.  

Agard-Jones is Managing Editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, fomerly served on the Editorial Working Group for Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, and with late historian Manning Marable is co-editor of the volume Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Her work has appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, the New West Indian Guide, and the volume Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (UVA Press, 2011). Outside of academe, she is the former coordinator of Oakland's Prison Activist Resource Center and is former Board Chair of New York City's Audre Lorde Project.

In Fall 2014 Vanessa Agard-Jones will join Yale University's faculty as Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

This event has been generously cosponsored by the Women's and Gender Studies Program, the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth, and the Department of French and Italian.