Jeanne-Marie Jackson

Professor of English & Director, Alexander Grass Humanities Institute

Affiliated Faculty
Headshot for Jeanne-Marie Jackson
Department
  • Center for Economy and Society
Social

Jeanne-Marie Jackson received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale in 2012 and joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2014. She is a Class of 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and Director of Hopkins’ Alexander Grass Humanities Institute.

Jackson is the author of three books that situate broad questions of comparative method, literature and philosophy, liberal thought, and interpretive scale in the context of African literature and intellectual history. Most recently, The Letter of the Law in J.E. Casely Hayford’s West Africa (Princeton 2026) offers a concept-driven account of how law buttressed a new kind of textual disposition among early-twentieth-century Gold Coast state-builders. The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing (Princeton 2021), which was awarded Honorable Mention for the African Literature Association’s Book of the Year Prize, reads African fiction in tandem with African philosophy to showcase the novel form’s negotiation between liberal selfhood and liberationist ideals. And South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation (Bloomsbury 2015) casts Russia’s nineteenth-century Golden Age of literature and ideas as a model for the study of later South African realist forms and epistemologies, also arguing for perceived disconnection as a source of transnational affinity. Jackson is currently at work on a short, co-authored book with Tsitsi Jaji for the new “Literature and Politics” series at Oxford University Press, as well as a long-term project that reads changing moral vocabularies through the history of gold and diamond mining in Ghana and South Africa.

She is also co-editor, with Adwoa Opoku-Agyemang, of the first critical edition of Casely Hayford’s 1911 novel Ethiopia Unbound (MSUP 2024), and, with Cajetan Iheka, the volume Intellectual Traditions of African Literature 1960-2015 (Cambridge UP 2025). Her scholarly work is published or forthcoming in a wide range of academic journals and edited collections, as well as public-facing venues including the New York Times; the New Left Review (Sidecar), Public Books, 3:AM Magazine, n+1, Africa Is a Country, The Conversation, Popula, the Chronicle Review, and The Hopkins Review. Links to this writing, as well as to selected interviews and conversations, can be found at jeannemariejackson.com.