Joy James is Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College. Her most recent books are In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities, New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency, and the (After)Life of Erica Garner, Contextualizing Angela Davis, and; her recent articles include "A Letter of Concern to Black Clergy Regarding "Cop City" (with Rev. Matthew V. Johnson, Jr.) in Logos, and a four-part series, Abolition Alchemy, in Inquest (with Kalonji Jama Changa).

She is the author of Resisting State Violence; Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics; Transcending the Talented Tenth; and Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Reader. Creator of the digital Harriet Tubman Literary Circle at UT Austin, James is also editor of The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings; Imprisoned Intellectuals; Warfare in the American Homeland; The Angela Y. Davis Reader; and co-editor of The Black Feminist Reader. She is a member of Penn State University's Policing, Policy, and Philosophy Initiative (3PI) and serves on the circle of advisors for Oxford Public Philosophy.

James has published numerous articles on: political theory; police, prison and slavery abolition; radicalizing feminisms; diasporic anti-black racism; and US politics. She writes on the Captive Maternal through the lens of "The Womb of Western Theory." James's forthcoming new works are Engage: Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous Futures and Beyond Cop Cities: Dismantling Corporate Funded Armies.