Esther Jones, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English

Department of English
Clark University
Worcester, MA 01610-1477

Phone: 508-793-7141
Email: esjones@clarku.edu

Education

B.A. Fisk University, 1998
M.A. The Ohio State University, 2001
Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 2006

Current Research and Teaching

Esther L. Jones is Associate Professor of English and the E. Franklin Frazier Chair of African American Literature, Theory and Culture. She teaches American and African American literature and culture, including Major American Writers II, African American Literature I and II, Special Topics courses in African American literature, literature and medicine, and speculative fiction. Her research and publications include subjects ranging from identity formation and intimate partner violence in popular culture to race, gender, and bioethics in science fiction. 

Her current book, Medicine and Ethics in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, examines the constructions of black pathology and bioethics in science fiction by contemporary black women writers. Examining the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability, Jones explores historical constructions of difference within the medical establishment, the ways in which ethical paradigms and practices variously respond to embodied difference, and black women science fiction writers’ responses to ethics, empathy, and the politics of difference within medicine.