Jordan Taliha McDonald is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard University with a secondary field in History of Science. For the 2025-2026 academic year, she worked on her dissertation as a Hutchins Family Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Jordan’s dissertation, “Trust Fall: Adultery, Complicit Rhetorics, and the Race Science Fictions of Fidelity” traces the conceptual history of adultery from the early modern period to the 20th century with a focus on how the term’s religious, literary, legal, aesthetic and cultural coherence has been transformed in distinct and discontinous ways by the history of African-European encounter, settler colonialism, racial slavery, and scientific-aesthetic efforts to conceptualize fidelity and infidelity in human form and relations.
Her academic work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Beinecke Scholarship, the Ford Foundation, the Hutchins Center and more. As a reference intern for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, she conducted archival research resulting in four essays for the Archives of American Art blog and Smithsonian Voices.
In addition to her scholarship, Jordan is an essayist, critic, editor, cultural worker, and (sometimes) poet. Her public writing, journalism, and cultural criticism have appeared in New York Magazine, The Believer, Artsy, Vulture, Africa is a Country, The Offing, The Harvard Review, Lux, Complex, and more. Her newsletter, “East Coast Lit(erary) Thot” can be read here.
She is also a host for the New Books Network’s “New Books in African American Studies” podcast and the co-host of Lose Your Sister podcast alongside writer Liberty Martin. Further examples of her audio work can also be found in the Audible audiobook edition of Minor Notes, Volume 1, edited by Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy, wherein she reads the poems of Georgia Douglas Johnson.
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