Questions surrounding US citizenship have long been (and continue to be) contentious. In her talk, Martha Jones explores the history of citizenship in the United States in the era before the Fourteenth Amendment, when free African Americans generated a pointed set of questions about who could be a citizen and what rights attached to them.

Jones is associate chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, associate professor of history and Afroamerican and African studies, and a member of the University of Michigan Law School's affiliated Literature, Science, and the Arts faculty. She is codirector of the Michigan Law Program in Race, Law & History and the Law in Slavery and Freedom Project. Her scholarly interests include the history of race, citizenship, slavery, and the rights of women in the United States and the Atlantic world. Jones is the author of "All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900" (2007). Her current projects include two books: "Overturning Dred Scott: Race, Rights, and Citizenship in Antebellum America" and "Riding the Atlantic World Circuit: Slavery and Freedom in the Era of the Haitian Revolution". She is working this year as the William C. and Ida Friday Fellow at the Center.