Jacqueline Jones

Jacqueline Jones is the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin, where she served as Director of Graduate Studies from 2010 to 2014 and Chair of the History Department from 2014 to 2020. She also taught at Wellesley College and Brandeis University. Her fields of study include U. S. labor, urban, southern, African American, and women’s history.

She is the co-author of a U. S. history survey textbook and the author of ten books in history; two of them were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in History: Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985; rev. ed. 2009) and A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America (2013).

Among the many other awards for her work are the Bancroft Prize in American History; a MacArthur Fellowship (1999-2004); the Taft Prize in Labor History; finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize;  honorable mention for the Lincoln Prize; and fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, and SSRC. In 2021 she served as president of the American Historical Association. Her most recent book is No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era (2023). She lives in Concord, Massachusetts.