T. Cole Jones

Promoted to Associate Professor
Department of History
colejones@purdue.edu

T. Cole Jones completed a BA in History at Duke University and a PhD in Early American History at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in Colonial and revolutionary America, the Atlantic world, the cultural history of violence, and war and society. Prior to joining the Purdue faculty, he was the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the New-York Historical Society.

Jones’ first book, “Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution,” was published in the University of Pennsylvania Press Early American Studies Series in 2020. By examining American treatment of enemy prisoners, this study reveals the factors that coalesced to transform a war for independence into a revolutionary struggle. His next book, “Loyalist Rising: The Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge,” is under contract with Westholme Press. In addition to this project, he is currently at work on a study of the western theater of the American Revolutionary War provisionally entitled, “Patrick Henry’s War: The Struggle for Empire in the Revolutionary West.”

Jones has published articles in the New England Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, the Journal of Military History, and Common-Place. He contributed a chapter to “Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American War of Independence,” edited by Glenn Moots and Philip Hamilton. His research has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Army Center of Military History, and the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon, among others.