Vanessa Agard-Jones earned her PhD from the joint program in Anthropology and French Studies at New York University, where she was a National Science Foundation Research Fellow and recipient of the Bourse Chateaubriand. A political anthropologist specializing in the study of gender and sexuality in the African diaspora, her ethnographic research focuses on the intersections of sexual and environmental politics and their relationship to debates about sovereignty in the (French) Caribbean.

Agard-Jones is Managing Editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism and with late historian Manning Marable is co-editor of the volume Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Her work has appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, the New West Indian Guide, and the volume Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (University of Virginia Press, 2011). She was a guest faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College and has also taught courses at City College/CUNY, the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education/CUNY, and New York University. Outside of academe, she is the former coordinator of Oakland’s Prison Activist Resource Center and is former Board Chair of New York City’s Audre Lorde Project.