Jacqueline Goldsby

Jacqueline Goldsby is Professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of the prizewinning A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and other articles about African American literature and book history during the long century of Jim Crow segregation, from 1865-1965. In 2015, she edited the Norton Critical Edition of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. And she’s currently at work finishing Writing from the Lower Frequencies: African American Literature and Its Mid-Century Moment.

The research required to launch Writing from the Lower Frequencies led Goldsby to design and direct “Mapping the Stacks: A Guide to Black Chicago’s Hidden Archives.” She managed that project from 2005-10, while she taught at the University of Chicago. “Mapping the Stacks” helped transform the practice of archival recovery and description in Chicago and across the U.S, as the project became the model for the Council on Library and Information Resources’ $27.4 million grant program, “Cataloguing Hidden Collections and Archives” (2008-14).

Publications:

• “Black Bibliography: Traditions and Futures,” Special Issue co-edited with Meredith L. McGill, Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America 116:2 (June 2022).
• The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man. James Weldon Johnson. Ed., Jacqueline Goldsby. (W.W. Norton, 2015).
• A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006)

Previous Organizations: 

• Yale University
• University of California at Berkeley,

My research and teaching focus on African American and American literature. I’m especially interested in the ways that authors and texts articulate un-archived, “secret” and so, unspeakable developments that shaped American life during the long century of Jim Crow segregation’s reign, from 1865 to 1965. I explore these tensions through interdisciplinary approaches to formal close reading, together with the material and cultural histories of Black-authored books—their composition, publication, circulation, and reception.

Bibliographic Study has long been an invigorating field of scholarship, but in the past five years it has become a thriving site of breakthrough initiatives and collaborations among scholars, librarians, curators, artists, and digital humanists.

Led by Co-Directors Meredith McGill (Professor of English at Rutgers University and the 2019-20 Beinecke Distinguished Fellow in the Humanities at Yale University) and Jacqueline Goldsby (Professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University), The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) aims to revive and transform Descriptive Bibliography—the systematic description of print materials as physical objects—for African American and Black Diaspora literary studies. The goal is to create a digital database whose capacities can reveal the dynamic social formations and aesthetic practices that are specific to Black print culture in the U.S. and beyond.

McGill and Goldsby believe that the digital environment is ideally suited for bibliographic information: unlike codex bibliographies, a digital bibliographic database can be queryable, expandable, revisable, and re-organizable (no longer ordered only by the lives of authors); it can include images of covers, illustrations, and vital bibliographic details; it can also be crowd-sourced and publicly accessible. By tapping the explanatory potential of digital technologies (specifically, the revolutionary metadata approach called “Linked Data”), the goal of this project is to build an electronic database whose networking capacities can reveal the social formations and aesthetic practices that are specific to Black print culture, in the U.S. and across the Black Diaspora.  

In April, 2026, the BBP convened the Networking Black Print: Reimagining Black Bibliography gathering as a chance to lift up and reflect on work that is re-shaping the practices of Black Bibliography—including the database our project has been building for the past 8 years.