Jones is a scholar and cultural critic. She currently serves as a Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. Receiving her doctorate in American Studies from Harvard, she is interested in the cultural reverberations of the American whaling industry’s long afterlife. Rather than tell the story of what happened on ships, she tells the stories of the storytellers: the whalemen, artists, writers, museum founders, journalists, and impresarios who made meaning out of whaling.