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Jill Colvin Jones, PhD

Professor of English

Jill Colvin Jones Professor of English

Jill Colvin Jones is Professor of English at Rollins College where she teaches courses that include American Literature, popular culture, and African-American Literature; also, Monsters in Literature and Film, Mean Girls, and Breaking Bad and the Great American Novel. Jones has published articles and chapters on mystery novels, Zora Neale Hurston, Harriet E. Wilson, Toni Morrison, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, James Weldon Johnson, Connie May Fowler, and Jerry Springer and the Puritans. She also pops off in the press from time to time, from The New York Times to the Orlando Sentinel, and you can find her on podcasts and local television stations giving her opinions on Hurston, Hemingway, hair products and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

She was the editor of The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature from 1999-2004.

She drinks a lot of coffee, watches some surprisingly shallow reality television, and loves lively conversations about literature, television, film, politics, ethics, monsters (yeah monsters) and other things.

Jones is endlessly nerdily fascinated by America: the promise, the politics, the dream, the Constitution, the literature, the pop culture, the television, the films. She will engage all day about it. Also please note her cool monster hand in the picture to the right.

T. 407.646.2528

Professor | Rollins College
2012 - Present
Director, Lucy Cross Center for Women and Their Allies, 2015-2016, 2017-2018
Coordinator, Zora Neale Hurston Festival Academic Conference, Rollins College, 2018
Academic Affairs Committee, 2014-2016
President of the A & S faculty, Rollins College, 2011-2013
Chair, Executive Committee of the A & S Faculty, Rollins College, 2011-2013

Associate Professor | Rollins College
2003 - 2012
Chair, English Department, 2003-2005
Editor, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature, 1999-2004
Co-Editor, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature, 1998-1999
External Reviewer, Hood College, 2013
Sexuality, Women and Gender Studies Steering Committee, 2013-2018
Chair, AAC subcommittee to revise standards for the evaluation of teaching,  2010-2011
Retention and Advising Committee, 2011
Chair, CEC, English Department (for Paul Reich) 2010, 2011
Advisor, Sigma Tau Delta, 2007-2009
Living and Learning Community Committee, 2007-2008
Faculty Team Co-Chair for Maya Angelou panel, Colloquy 2006-2007
Executive Board, Florida College English Association, 2009-2011
Co-Director of the FCEA Conference at Rollins College, 2010
Humanities Division Chair, 2004-2005
Board of Trustees, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society 2003-2005
Humanities Division Chair, 2004-2005

Assistant Professor | Rollins College
1996 - 2003
Mentoring Team, 2000-2001
Christian A. Johnson Steering Committee, 2000-2001
Student Life Committee, 1999-2001
Rollins College Program Advisory Committee, 1998-2000
Mini-term Task Force, 1998
Women’s Studies Steering Committee, 1997-2000
Board of Directors, Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence, 1997-1999
Maya Angelou Diversity Committee, 1996-1998
Thomas P. Johnson Learning Center Committee, 1997-1998
English Association Advisor, 1996-1997

  • Lecturer of American Literature | University of New Hampshire
    1992 - 1995

    Teaching Assistant | University of New Hampshire
    1985 - 1987   
  •  
  • Teaching Assistant | Tufts University
    1988 - 1990
    Composition and Rhetoric, Writing about Literature, Victorian Literature
  •   
  • Teacher | Winnacunnet High School, Hampton, New Hampshire
    Summer 1987

  • Writing Workshop Facilitator | State of New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services
    1987

Book Chapters and Peer-Reviewed Publications

“Taking the Axe to Babylon: Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Lost’ Caroline Stories, Gender, Place and Power.” Mississippi Quarterly (Forthcoming, 2018) 

“Zora Neale Hurston’s Florida Beginnings: The Cakewalk, the Jim Crow Car, and Internalized Racism in Color Struck.” Literary Floridas, Editors John King, Danita Berg, Nathan Holic.  (Forthcoming).

“Eatonville, Florida: Mythologizing the First Incorporated Black Town.”  Florida’s Golden Age, Editors Maurice O’Sullivan and Bruce Stephenson, (Florida Historical Society Press, 2018). 

“Cracker Redemption: Life, death, and homecoming in The Problem with Murmur Lee.”  In Women of Florida Fiction: Essays on 12 Sunshine State Writers, Editors Tammy Powley and April Van Camp, (McFarland Press, 2015). 

“Passing for Racist:  Cross Creek as a Cracker Coming-of-Age Story” Florida Studies: Proceedings of the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association.  Editors:  Maurice J. O’Sullivan and Paul Reich, (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011).

Rights and Birthrights:  The mis-reading of Jacob and Esau and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.”  Florida Studies: Proceedings of the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association Editors: Claudia Slate and Carole Policy, (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Jun 2010).

“Hags and Whores: American Sin and Shaming from Salem to Springer.” Journal of American Culture.  (June, 2009):  146-154.

"'The Eye of a Needle': Morrison's Paradise, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, and the American Jeremiad." The Faulkner Journal. (Volume XVII, Number 2. Spring, 2002).

"Cowboy kitsch" in Bad Boys and Bad Girls in the Badlands: Southwest Crime and Fiction,  Steven Glassman and Maurice 0' Sullivan, eds. (Popular Press, October, 2001).

Interview with Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature, (2001). 

“Carol Hemingway's 'Two Girls': The Other Hemingway in Florida." The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature, (VllI, 1999): 95-100. 

"The Disappearing 'I' in Our Nig." Legacy, 13.1 (June 1996): 38-53

"'You Don't Know about Me': The Disenfranchised Narrator in Nineteenth Century United States Fiction." DIA 56.10 (Apr 1996): 3959ADAINo.: DA9605706.

Book Reviews, Other Publications

2005. Review:  Anne Blythe Meriwether, ed, Blood of My Blood by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings; Rodger L. Tarr, ed., Max and Marjorie: The Correspondence between Maxwell E. Perkins and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Resources for American Literary Study, Volume 9. Eds Jackson R. Bryer and Richard Kopley. 2005 AMS Press, Inc. New York. 406-409

Biographical Sketches of Faith Baldwin, Richard Stoddard and Jessamyn West, Encyclopedia of American Literature, (1999).

"Harriet Prescott Spofford," The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States. eds. Cathy Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin (NY: Oxford UP, 1994)

  • Professor Jill Jones teaching
  • American Literature from the Puritans to the Present
  • African American Literature from the Beginnings to the Present
  • The Immigrant Figure in American Literature
  • Breaking Bad and the Great American Novel
  • Monsters in Literature and Film
  • Sin and Redemption in American Literature
  • Mean Girls In Literature and Film
  • Banned Books in America
  • Coming of Age in the World Novel
  • Coming of Age in American Literature
  • Bad Boys and Good Girls: Coming of Age in American Literature 
  • Growing Up Female
  • Autobiography
  • The American Civil War (Team-Taught with American History Professor)
  • The Hidden Civil Rights Movement (Team-Taught with American History Professor)
  • Troubling the Waters: The Plays of Tony Kushner (Team-Taught with Theater Professor)
  • The American Identity: The American Self from Within and Without (Team-Taught with Philosophy Professor)
  • Girls Who Break the Rules (Team-Taught with Critical Media Studies Professor)
  • Social Problems in Fact and Fiction (Team-Taught with Sociology Professor)
  • Zora Neale Hurston Senior Seminar
  • Absalom! Absalom! Junior Colloquy
  • The American Gothic
  • American Gothic and Horror in Literature and Film
  • American Protest Literature
  • The Filthy Rich and the Dirt Poor in Am Lit and Pop Culture 
  • Hellfire: American Rebel Identity in Literature
  • The Fantastic and Uncanny in Literature 
  • Angels and Demons in Literature and Popular Culture
  • Dr. Jekyll Mini Course
  • Tears and Torment: The Sentimental Novel in 19th Century American Literature
  • Con Men (and Women), Grifters and Hucksters in American Literature
  • Adaptation:  Book to Film

  • Academics Committee, Zora! Festival, 2017-2018
  • Coordinator of "Communities Conference II: Civic Conversations Continue," 2018
  • Executive Board, Florida College English Association, 2009-2011    
  • Co-Director of the FCEA Conference at Rollins College, 2010
  • Board of Trustees, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society 2003-2005    
  • Board of Directors, Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence, 1997-1999