Dr. Joy James is the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College, where she also teaches courses on Political Science and Africana Studies. Her areas of academic focus include political theory, human rights, antiblackness and genocide, feminisms, and transforming the carceral justice system. She is the author and editor of several books including Resisting State Violence, Seeking the ‘Beloved Community’, and Transcending the Talented Tenth.

Prior to joining Williams College, Joy was a Senior Research Fellow at the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, where she developed the Harriet Tubman Digital Repository, an online library of information, art, narratives and maps that support the expansion of sustainable communities and anti-violence initiatives. During a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she worked closely with renowned human rights scholar Angela Davis, and edited the Angela Y. Davis Reader.

She has also previously held positions at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; Brown University; Columbia University; and the University of Colorado Boulder, where she served as director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. Her recent research has focused on incarceration and resistance to police violence, especially among imprisoned mothers.