Vanessa Agard-Jones

Toxicity, Racialization, Coloniality, Gender and Sexuality, Space and Scale

At its most expansive, Vanessa Agard-Jones's work asks how coloniality is made material: in social forms, in human and nonhuman bodies, and in the landscapes in which we live. With a focus on Black life in the Atlantic world, she conducts historical and ethnographic research on racialization, environmental degradation, and the politics of gender and sexuality.

In Body Burdens: Toxic Endurance and Decolonial Desire in the French Atlantic (under contract, Duke University Press), Agard-Jones reframes the concept of body burden to account for the accretion of toxicities in Martinique, a French territory in the Caribbean. Focused on material exposures to a pesticide called kepone/chlordécone and on immaterial exposures to racism, sexism, and homophobia, the book asks how contemporary debates about sovereignty on the island are articulated through the prisms of porosity and contamination. In three sections, entitled Sand, Soil and Sediment, she brings over 15 years of ethnographic and archival research on the island into conversation with theoretical questions about French coloniality, queer etiologies, anthropocenic pasts and dystopic futures. 

In The Synthetic Atlantic: Chemical Kinship and the Intimacies of Empire (under review, Duke University Press), she takes inspiration from Sidney Mintz's classic history of sugar in the Atlantic world — and the rejoinders of his critics — to trace the politics that emerge along one chemical's commodity chain, following kepone/chlordécone from its post–World War II synthesis in Hopewell, Virginia through its application on banana plantations in Martinique and Guadeloupe to its dispersal across France, Cameroon, Brazil, Poland, and beyond. Because kepone is an endocrine disruptor, a central question for the project is how exposed communities manage anxieties about the relationship of their racialized and gendered bodies to the physical and social environments transformed by this synthetic presence. An accompanying digital humanities initiative, Mapping Toxic Entanglements, visualizes toxic exposure as a relational and transnational phenomenon, organizing kepone's itineraries— the routes of manufacture, export, application, regulation, and embodiment— as a network of nodes and edges connecting Virginia's industrial production, France's regulatory apparatus, Martinique's plantation economy, Cameroon's export agriculture, Brazil's chemical compounding, and Poland's chemical processing in a single chemical itinerary.

In Detox: What Remains, Agard-Jones asks what forms of remediation, repair, and collective survival become thinkable when restoration is foreclosed, when the chemicals that most threaten contemporary life are "forever chemicals" that refuse every form of biological degradation a human or nonhuman body can mount. Set along the Hudson River corridor between New York City and its upstate communities, the book develops substrate as a concept naming the material infrastructure — soil, fascia, sediment — through which toxicity persists and through which repair, if it comes, must also move. With Body Burdens and The Synthetic Atlantic, Detox completes a trilogy on toxicity in the Atlantic world.

She is currently pursuing these newer projects:

A short book, Sand (under review, Bloomsbury Object Lessons), follows a single grain of black volcanic sand from a beach in Martinique into the concrete the French state poured across the island after departmentalization, the glass and silicon of the modern world, the violent planetary trade in aggregate, and finally back to the shore as sargassum: what the sea returns to the coastlines from which it was taken. An arc of essays developing the concept of vegetality— thinking with and through Suzanne Césaire's figuring of Black people as homme-plante— is also under way.

Alongside these academic lines of inquiry, Agard-Jones is at work on Low Tide: Black Intertidal Ecologies on the Atlantic Seaboard, a narrative book on Black foraging practice across multiple shorelines, and on a coauthored cookbook on food, spirit, and the African diaspora. 

At Columbia, Professor Agard-Jones's courses include Ethnographies of Black Life, Toxic, Porous Bodies, Object Histories, the Secret Lives of Plants, Vegetalities and the department's gateway course Interpretation(s) of Culture. She serves on the Executive Committees of the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, the Center for Science and Society, and the Program in Medical Humanities of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. In 2020 she received Columbia's Lenfest Award for Distinguished Teaching; in 2026 she will deliver the American Ethnological Society's Distinguished Lecture at the AAA annual meeting.

Professor Agard-Jones earned a joint PhD in Anthropology and French Studies from New York University, an MA in African American Studies from Columbia, and a BA in Political Science from Yale. She spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia's Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Beyond Columbia, she is a member of Scholars for Social Justice, and serves on the editorial boards of Political and Legal Anthropology Review and Environment and Society: Advances in Research.

Outside of the academy, Professor Agard-Jones is the former coordinator of Oakland's Prison Activist Resource Center, taught for three years in Atlanta Public Schools, and is a former Board Chair of New York City's Audre Lorde Project. From 2019 to 2023 she served on the Board of Directors of Land to Learn, a Hudson Valley organization growing a movement for food justice and community wellness through garden-based education.

PhD, Anthropology and French Studies, New York University
MA, African American Studies, Columbia University
BA, Political Science, Yale University