GENDER & SEXUALITY STUDIES PROGRAM

Bryana Jones is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Black Studies. Bry received their bachelor's degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University (2017), her Master’s degree in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Georgia State University (2019), and their Master’s degree in African American Studies from Northwestern University (2023). She has also taught at Spelman College in the Comparative Women’s Studies department.   

Bry's research interests include Black queer and trans feminisms; queer masculinities; affect; storytelling and/as theory; and the historical development of racialized genders and sexualities in U.S. and non-U.S. contexts. Her current work examines the interrelation between affect, gender, queerness, and Blackness to consider the ways that Black being is constituted through or sustained by the affective. Their dissertation project ultimately aims to theorize the ontological capacities of affect vis-à-vis Blackness and Black people’s gendered and sexual experiences of being, non-being, and being-otherwise.