Dr. Ebony Jones and “Geographies of Punishment”
l to r: Prof. Justin Leroy, Prof. Ebony Jones, Prof. Sarah Balakrishnan
The History Department and Professors Balakrishnan and Leroy recently welcomed Dr. Ebony Jones, Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University, to the Atlantic Worlds Workshop on October 20, 2025 to discuss a chapter from her upcoming book, Slavery’s Dangerous Characters: Punishment and Black Mobile Existence in Jamaica’s Atlantic World.
In the workshop, Jones offered a detailed overview of her manuscript, tracing its intellectual origins to her graduate studies under Jennifer Morgan, where she first encountered Diana Patton’s work on Jamaican incarceration. The project evolved from her dissertation, which focused on colonial governance and the penal use of transportation to discipline the enslaved.
Students and faculty in the workshop raised questions surrounding the perspective of the enslaved experience, while others interrogated the archive and the scarcity of sources and the silence around gender. Jones reflected on these methodological challenges, acknowledging the frustrating but welcomed limits of the archive. Through these fragmented records, Jones reconstructs a history of forced mobility that was both punitive and generative of new networks of survival and kinship.
Ultimately, the discussion highlighted the originality and importance of Jones’ work. By reframing transportation as a “secondary death sentence” and an extension of the slave trade’s punitive logic, “Geographies of Punishment” created discussions surrounding how Black mobility, whether coerced or self-determined, was central to the making and unmaking of the Atlantic world.
