Arthur C. Jones

Arthur C. Jones is an American clinical psychologist, educator, and music scholar. He is professor emeritus of Music, Culture and Psychology at the University of Denver and is the founder of The Spirituals Project, an interdisciplinary research, education, and performance focused on African American spirituals.

He served as President of the University of Denver Faculty Senate from 2014 to 2016.

Early life and education Jones was born on February 2, 1946 in the Bronx, New York, the youngest of four children of Ferdinand Taylor Jones and Esther Lillian Haggie Jones. He graduated from Andrew Jackson High School in Queens, N.Y. in 1963. He earned an A.B. in psychology from Drew University in 1967, an M.A. in clinical psychology from the University of Iowa in 1969, and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Iowa in 1974, where his graduate study was supported by Danforth Foundation and Woodrow Wilson Foundation graduate fellowships.

In 2020, he completed The Living School program at the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Career Before joining the University of Denver, he held faculty positions at Sangamon State University (now the University of Illinois at Springfield), Bowling Green State University, and the University of Colorado School of Medicine, where he also served as Special Assistant to the Dean for Diversity Initiatives, and maintained a private clinical psychology practice in Denver from 1981 to 1995.

Between 2009 and 2016, he held several academic and administrative roles at the Colorado Women's College of the University of Denver, including Academic Chair and Associate Dean. His active work at the University of Denver culminated in three years as a Teaching Professor at the Lamont School of Music between 2016 and 2019,

In 1991, Jones began a series of lecture-concert programs, locally and nationally, focused on the cultural, psychological and spiritual functions of the sacred folk songs known as spirituals, which were created and first sung by enslaved Africans in North America.

In 1998 he founded The Spirituals Project, an initiative dedicated to research, education, and performance related to the African American spirituals tradition. The Project was established as a Colorado incorporated nonprofit in 1998 and as a federally incorporated nonprofit in 1999. In 2009, a documentary film “I Can Tell the World” by filmmakers Larry Bograd and Coleen Hubbard was produced that profiled the work of The Spirituals Project Choir.

Scholarly works Jones is the author of Wade in the Water: The Wisdom of the Spirituals (Orbis Books, 1993), a study of the historical, cultural, psychological and spiritual dimensions of African American spirituals.

His broader scholarly work addresses African American music, cultural history, African American and multicultural psychology, spirituality,

Personal life Jones was married to Antonia Pride in 1968, and together they had two sons: Timothy (later Nmutakula), born in 1970, and Sekou, born in 1972. The marriage ended in divorce in 1977. In 1983, he married Christine Chao, and they welcomed a daughter, Joella, born in 1989.

Selected publications