Kimberly V. Jones is a graduate candidate at Rice University. Her research focuses on histories of the Afro-Atlantic world, the gendered identities of Black women, and African American history. Kimberly’s current project considers the relationship(s) between slavery, capitalism, and disability as a critical debate in Early American Republic scholarship. Her dissertation, “Critical Bodies: Slavery, Gender and Disability in Early Republic Virginia” considers disability and racial capitalist frameworks to reveal strategies to employ capitalist extraction of disabled enslaved people’s bodies and most importantly, the efforts of slaves and ‘fit’ or disabled to constitute community and provide support to their kin despite the trauma of slavery. Kimberly been involved in building academic and intellectual communities at Rice as well as lending her leadership abilities to on-campus associations. In her time at Rice, she served on the executive board of the Humanities Graduate Student Association and Black Graduate Student Association and as a member of the steering committee for Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice. In addition, she has created intellectual colloquia at Rice such as The Black Feminist Reading Lab and Center for African and African American Study Black Thought Reading Lab. She is also a program manager for a podcast entitled Medicine Race and Democracy, where she invites and holds interviews with activists and scholars. Kimberly’s research is supported by a Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Fellowship for 2022 and a Mellon/ACLS dissertation completion fellowship.
