Professor Emeritus
Dr. Mack Henry Jones Department of Political Science Clark Atlanta University

Bio:

I was born in London, England, in 1956. In 1968, my family moved to Jamaica, where I attended St Elizabeth Technical High School until eleventh grade, and Munro College for sixth form. Simultaneously with sixth form I was volunteer number 852 in the National Youth Service, working first as a primary school teacher, and then as an assistant field officer.

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In 1975 I was admitted to the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, graduating in 1978. I taught briefly at Brown’s Town Community College, in the parish of St Ann. I then worked briefly at the British High Commission. From 1979 to 1982 I was research officer and staff writer for the Gleaner newspapers. In 1982, three poems of mine were published in the literary anthology Focus: 1982, edited by Mervyn Morris. Subsequently, two of those poems were published in the Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, edited by Paula Burnett. I also had poems published in Caribbean Quarterly, Vol 58, No 1 in 2012.

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In 1982, I moved from Kingston to New York city, where I attended New York University, obtaining an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. In 1988 I entered the University of California, San Diego, receiving the PhD in Political Science in 1994.​ From 1994 to 1998, I taught at Morehead State University in Kentucky. My first full-length monograph, Class Alliances and the Liberal Authoritarian State: The Roots of Post-Colonial Democracy in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Surinam was published in 1998.  Starting in 1999 I was an adjunct instructor at both Georgia Perimeter College and Clark Atlanta University. I became assistant professor of Political Science full time at CAU in 2001. 

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I became Department Chair of Political Science in 2009, and served in that post until 2012. In 2010 I published my second book, Only West Indians: Creole Nationalism in the British West Indies. In 2014 my third monograph, Michael Manley and Jamaican Democracy, 1972-1980: The Word Is Love, was published. While Chair I also was second principal on a US Department of Education grant with Dr Neema Noori of the University of West Georgia to teach a combined course, at CAU and UWG, on the politics of central Asia. In 2016, following surgery to correct a teratogenic condition, post-operative treatment caused severe damage to my body and obliged me to cease working.  

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I taught at the university level from 1994 to 2016, with only one short break. I taught, as noted above, at Clark Atlanta as an adjunct from 1999 to 2001, and a full-time faculty member from 2001 on. Former students of mine are scattered all over the world. They include college professors, a college dean, a diplomat, and a number of teachers, and civil servants, scattered around the planet. I chaired fourteen successful doctoral dissertation committees, served as a member on eight others. two of them outside the Political Science Department, and served on two MA thesis committees. Of especial note, I chaired the last doctoral dissertation of the Department of International Relations. I served on the School of Arts and Sciences research and travel committee, on the standards committee, and on the curriculum committee Beyond Clark Atlanta, I also served on the Best Dissertation Committee the Caribbean Studies Association.

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In 2017, I moved to Sarasota, Florida. I have continued to write book reviews for Caribbean Quarterly. I have had reviews published in almost every issue of that journal since 2013. I have also been attempting to learn ancient Greek, Διός δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή (and thus accomplished was the plan of Zeus).​ Along the way, I have fathered two sons, both now in their thirties. Both their mother and I find this alarming. I have also, thanks to being an academic, visited fourteen countries on four continents, and six states in the United States either for research or conference presentation.