Joseph Jay Jones was born and educated in Nebraska, where he completed undergraduate studies in science before obtaining his PhD from Stanford University in 1934. For a year between 1934 and 1935, Jones taught at Colorado State College, later moving to Austin to take up a position as lecturer in English at The University of Texas. Jones was based in Austin for most of his forty-year academic career, and he also took up a series of visiting professorships in the United States, New Zealand, South Africa, and Hong Kong.
In 1935 he married Johanna Zabel, with whom he collaborated in numerous scholarly research and writing projects, many of which credit her as co-author. The couple had three children.
In addition to Jones's specialty in American transcendentalism, his career was marked by a life-long commitment to the study and teaching of English literatures from the Commonwealth, with particular emphasis on Australia and Canada.
His most remarkable contribution to the study of Australian-American relations is
Radical Cousins: Nineteenth-Century American and Australian Writers (1976), which explores the historical, economic and cultural aspects of the exchanges between the two nations. The book was considered a valuable contribution to its field at the time of its publication. This opinion is still widely held, even by those who, like critic
Ken Stewart, have noted
Radical Cousins over-states the influence of America in Australian matters, without taking sufficient stock of other local, national, and global models that had an influence of the development of local literary culture.
Deborah Jordan has noted that the book was published by the University of Queensland Press, as part of an its 1970s commitment to increase the press's participation in the American trade and academic markets, both as buyer and seller of Australasian rights. In his role as editor of the
Twayne's World Authors Series Jones oversaw a series of studies about the life and works of Australian and Commonwealth writers, thus contributing to the appreciation and diffusion of these literatures.
Jones contributed to the field of scholarly literary research in a variety of ways, for example by compiling a directory of archives holding the manuscripts of US authors. He also served as editor for various academic publications, and participated in academic debates around questions of pedagogy. Professor Jones retired in 1975, but continued to publish well into the 1980s.
In addition to his varied academic pursuits, Jones took a keen interest in environmental issues. Once retired, he contributed to the conservation of the Waller Creek, which runs through the grounds of the University of Texas campus grounds.
