Alethia Jones earned MA and Ph.D. degrees in Political Science at Yale University (2005). Her primary teaching and research interests are in the fields of American politics, particularly urban and ethnic politics, the politics of the policymaking process and American political development. She studies the role of politics and policy in integrating immigrant communities into US society. Her dissertation, Bootstraps and Beltways: The State’s Role in Immigrant Community Banking, identifies an institutional dimension to immigrant integration where new regulations that democratized banking played an integral in the development of immigrant community financial institutions. She has received research fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Virginia, and the Center for the Study of Race, Inequality and Politics (Yale University). She served as senior research associate for the Community Renaissance Fellows Program, a HUD-funded comprehensive community development program headquartered at Yale University
Professor Jones’s work blends the world of practice with research and teaching. Prior to attending Yale, she served as lead policy staff to a member of the New York City Council. She managed a policy portfolio that included health, housing, welfare and transportation policy initiatives, with attention to the impact on Brooklyn’s Caribbean immigrant population. During her graduate career her consulting and research activities included projects in Boston, Chicago, Miami, New York, New Haven, Philadelphia and Washington, DC.
At Rockefeller College she is affiliated with the Center for Women in Government and Civil Society. She teaches courses in policy analysis, bureaucratic politics and immigrant policy.
