Hilary Jones is helping to write the history books – literally. Jones, an associate professor in the Department of History, studies the social history of Africa and the French empire, the Francophone Atlantic, comparative race and slavery, women and gender, and Africa’s urban histories.

She also has a joint appointment with the African and African Diaspora Studies Program (AADS) and is an affiliate faculty member with the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. For the past two years, she served as the AADS Graduate Program Director, managing recruitment, mentoring incoming cohorts, and supervising students’ exit requirements. This upcoming academic year, however, she’ll be on sabbatical, conducting research for her latest book, “From Senegambia to the French Antilles: West Africa and the Making of the French Atlantic World.”

Jones is investigating the nature of the slave trade before colonial rule in West Africa (unlike the colonial period in the Americas, which began in the 15th century, the colonial period in Africa runs from the late 19th to the middle of the 20th century). “The peoples of the Senegal River valley and the forest regions of Gambia and Guinea had similar state systems, trade relations, and cultural practices,” she says. “The Atlantic slave trade established routes that also created patterns of engagement and negotiation. Many times, Africa is positioned in discussions about the slave trade as the place that people of African descent in the Americas came from, but there were great economic, social, and cultural changes that occurred there as a result.”

After the Haitian revolution, France outlawed the slave trade, but it continued for some decades.  During this period, the French enacted policies that sent enslaved Africans in the French Caribbean colonies who were accused of crime to Senegal.  The movements of groups such as merchants and indigenous priests who traveled back and forth between the two areas, created a unique relationship and the French created a colony called Libreville in today’s Gabon in order to resettle liberated slaves from illegal slave vessels. By charting these movements, Jones hopes to better understand the transatlantic slave trade and how its legacy is understood and remembered by both contemporary Senegalese and people of the French Caribbean.

Jones’ interest in the inter-connected histories of Africa, Europe, and the Americas began to take shape during her undergrad days. While studying at Spelman College, an historically black liberal arts college for women in Atlanta, Georgia, she spent a year studying abroad at Cheikh Anta Diop University (also known as the University of Dakar) in Dakar, Senegal. “I realized I could make contributions to knowledge about an African past for an American audience, people who are wholly unfamiliar with this history,” she says.

Jones received a fellowship from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, to be in residence at Yale University for one month this fall. She’ll follow that with two more prestigious awards, a U.S. Scholar Fulbright Award and a Council of American Overseas Research Center’s National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Research Fellowship. These awards will allow her to conduct fieldwork in Senegal for eight months in 2020.

She’ll be affiliated with the West African Research Center in Dakar, which is the only American Overseas Research Center in sub-Saharan Africa, and she will work with graduate students pursuing degrees in Anthropology and History at University Cheikh Anta Diop who are interested in research on slavery, the slave trade, and the African Diaspora. Her work was also made possible by FIU’s Humanities Research Grant, a program supported by the Office of the Provost.

The study of history is important, says Jones. “History gives us the tools to take ourselves out of the present and see the world from a different era. We can then come to a deeper and more critical understanding of own time, the human condition, and how that changes over time.”

FIU Women in Research is a regular feature of ADVANCE News that examines the impressive work female faculty members are doing at the university.