https://www.jordantmcdonald.com/about daily 1.0 2026-07-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/606bef5f2f277851e3a89104/fdadcf26-3584-4960-bd4d-8d28517b680a/IMG_2279+%281%29.jpg Jordan Taliha McDonald 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 tranformed 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. . https://www.jordantmcdonald.com/new-page-71 daily 0.75 2025-11-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/606bef5f2f277851e3a89104/4ecf4c33-b0e3-4511-aacc-f9362a67dbb3/Screenshot+2023-02-01+133546.jpg Scholarship - Abstract What if the category of the pet was defined by forced domestication rather than species? In her 1943 essay “The Pet Negro System,” published in The American Mercury, Zora Neale Hurston theorizes the “pet Negro” within the social and political structure of the 20th century American South as a figure whose existence is shaped by an anti-Black economy of allowances, which has significant consequences for what Hortense Spillers refers to as “intramural Black life.” Exploring Hurtson’s formulation and delineation of the “pet Negro” and “stray” classes, this article argues that Hurston offers us a critique of Black elite comfort and complicity beyond the popular rhetorical discourses of domesticated (dis)loyalty thus opening up a framework for thinking of intraracial betrayal not as a matter of idiosyncratic cowardice, but as a reminder of how the singularity of anti-Blackness assures ontological precarity and produces anti-sociality. Taking seriously Saidiya Hartman’s articulation that “the domestic space, as much as the field, defined [the enslaved’s] experience of enslavement and the particular vulnerabilities of the captive body,” this essay considers the narrative of domestication as it concerns theories of the pet, the animal, and the enslaved fungible Black subject. Read Here https://www.jordantmcdonald.com/eclt daily 0.75 2025-11-18 https://www.jordantmcdonald.com/pengame daily 0.75 2026-04-26 https://www.jordantmcdonald.com/eastcoastliterarythoughtstore daily 0.75 2025-10-13 https://www.jordantmcdonald.com/eastcoastliterarythoughtstore/phd-application-editing-assistance-one-draft monthly 0.5 2025-07-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/606bef5f2f277851e3a89104/a4a1b2a2-3b7c-4c20-847d-d489e79a7670/Urgent+PHD+application+assistance+%283%29.jpg East Coast Lit(erary) Thought Store - PhD Application Editing Assistance (One Draft) https://www.jordantmcdonald.com/eastcoastliterarythoughtstore/phd-application-consulting-30-min-session monthly 0.5 2025-07-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/606bef5f2f277851e3a89104/0cadc3d2-1c31-4b71-9166-a143d4594c51/Urgent+PHD+application+assistance+%282%29.jpg East Coast Lit(erary) Thought Store - PhD Application Consulting (30 min session)