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.

• “The African Gold Coast Essay: Straddling Fact and Prophecy.” Chapter in the Cambridge History of the British Essay, eds. Denise Gigante and Jason Childs. Cambridge UP, 2024.
• “Sisyphean Selves: The African Novel of Ideas Roundtable Response.” Safundi, 2024.
• “Against Ethnography: On Teaching Minority Literature.” Chapter in Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum, eds. Ato Quayson and Ankhi Mukherjee. Cambridge UP, 2023.
• “Coetzee's Russians.” Chapter in The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee, eds. Lucy Graham and Andrew van Der Vlies, 2023.
• “John Guillory, Meet Kwasi Wiredu: A 1990s Guide to the Future English Department.” Special issue of Genre, 56.1 (2023).
• “The Facts at the Heart of the Matter: Character and Objectivity in the Making of the Fante Intelligentsia.” Chapter in African Literatures as World Literature, eds. Alexander Fyfe and Madhu Krishnan. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Pages 233-53.
• “A Voice in the Crowd: The African Novel of Ideas Book Forum Response.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 9.2 (2022): 273-277.
• “Stanlake Samkange’s Insufferable Zimbabwe: Distanciating Trauma from the Novel to Philosophy.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 8.2 (2021): 158-176.
• Response to Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery, for the journal Humanity.
• “African Fiction and Philosophy,” article for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature.
• “African Literature and the European Canon,” chapter in Wiley-Blackwell’s new Companion to African Literatures.
• “Modernism after Modernism,” editorial statement for the Field Reports blog on Modernism/modernity Print Plus 4.3 (2019).
• “A Case for ‘Site-Activated’ Modernism: Elmina Asafo Aesthetics.” Modernism/modernity Print Plus, 4.1 (2019).
• Review of Cajetan Iheka’s book Naturalizing Africa (2019).
• “Plurality in Question: Zimbabwe and the Agonistic African Novel.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 51.2 (2018): 339-361.
• “Comparison Re-Justified.” Invited response to Joseph Slaughter’s 2017 American Comparative Literature Association Presidential Address. Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literature Inquiry 5.3 (2018): 255-261.
• “Reading for the Region in New African Novels: Flight, Form, and the Metonymic Ideal.” Research in African Literatures 49.1 (2018): 42-62.
• Interview with Elnathan John. Research in African Literatures 48.2 (2017): 89-93.
• “Introduction: Religion, Secularity, and African Writing,” with Nathan Suhr-Sytsma. Research in African Literatures 48.2 (2017): vii-xvi.
• Review essay on The Lives of the Novel (Princeton) and The Novel: An Alternative History (Bloomsbury), Comparative Literature Studies 53.4 (2016): 847-851.
• “Retreating Reality: Chekhov’s South African Afterlives.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 45.1 (2015): 46-78.
• “You Are Where You Aren’t: Mark Behr and the Not-Quite-Global Novel.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 14.2 (2013): 175-190.
• “Singular Exceptions: Animal Instrumentality in Tolstoy and Coetzee.” English Studies in Africa 55.2 (2012): 29-42.
• “Going to the Dogs: Enduring Isolation in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf.” Studies in the Novel 43.3 (2011): 343-362.