For Jonathan Michael Square, fashion is a language of power, identity, and survival. A scholar, writer, and curator, he explores the politics of dress in the African diaspora, revealing how fashion practice and visual culture function both as a form of personal expression and as political acts. As an assistant professor of Black visual culture at Parsons’ School of Art and Design History and Theory, Square applies his interdisciplinary expertise to critical questions of race, representation, and material culture. 

Square earned a bachelor’s degree in history at Cornell University, a master’s in Latin American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in history at New York University. His background in cultural and historical studies has provided a solid foundation for his present-day research in the ways communities use fashion as a means of self-definition and cultural preservation. Over the course of his studies, Square has developed a distinctive scholarly approach, one that combines academic research with curatorial storytelling to reveal overlooked or erased narratives.

Today Square is a leading voice in Black fashion history. In 2019, he founded Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom, a digital humanities platform exploring sartorial agency among enslaved and free people of African descent. With its blend of archival research, image analysis, and commentary, the project has become a widely respected and accessible resource. He publishes broadly as well; his book Negro Cloth: How Slavery Birthed the American Fashion Industry  will be published next year. 

Square has also curated or contributed to exhibitions at a variety of institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Winterthur Museum, and the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (SJDC) at Parsons. His exhibition Past Is Present: Black Artists Respond to the Complicated Histories of Slavery was recently mounted at the Herron School of Art and Design, and Square served as co-curator of Rendering Revolution, an exhibition exploring the visual legacy of the Haitian Revolution through fashion and textile art, which was presented in 2025 at the SJDC. Square’s Almost Unknown: The African-American Picture Gallery opened at the Winterthur in May 2025 and runs until 2026. In 2025, Square contributed to the exhibition Superfine, which was presented by The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. For Superfine, Square curated a vignette based on his research into the ways enslaved and free Black individuals used dandyism for aesthetic expression and as a radical assertion of agency, selfhood, and resistance in a racially oppressive society.

Whether writing, lecturing, or curating, Square asks: Whose histories are told through clothing, and what stories have yet to be told? For him, fashion is never just about what people wear but about who they are, what they are resisting, and how they thrive.