Africana Studies / Rites and Reason Theatre

Eric T. Jones is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University.

Jones has a B.A. in Communication and Africana Studies from the University of Pittsburgh and

an M.A. in Religious Studies from Howard University. His research interests include the

nineteenth and twentieth-century Black Freedom Struggle, the Environmental Justice

Movement, the Medical Humanities, and Systemic Racism. He has served as a member of the

Simmons Center’s Race, Medicine and Social Justice research cluster since 2019. Jones’s

dissertation project is an oral history evaluating the intergenerational health effects of

industrial air pollution in southwestern Pennsylvania. His project focuses specifically on U.S.

Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, interrogating the human cost of air pollution, and the community’s

response between 1970 and 2000.