John Jackson, Penn's First PIK Professor

At Penn, Jackson is the Richard Perry University Associate Professor of Communication and Anthropology in the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Anthropology.

Before coming to Penn, Jackson taught in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and spent three years as a junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Jackson received his BA in Communications (Radio, TV, Film) from Howard University in Washington DC in 1993 and his PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University in New York City in 2000.

As a filmmaker, Jackson has produced a feature-length fiction film, documentaries and film-shorts that have screened at film festivals internationally.

His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Harvard University's Milton Fund, and the Lilly Endowment (during a year at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina).

Jackson is currently conducting an ethnographic project examining Global Black Hebrewism, as well as completing a book on the philosophy of qualitative social science research. He is also working on a documentary film about contemporary conspiracy theories in urban America, Novus Ordo Seclorum.

Jackson is author of Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (Basic Civitas, 2008). He has written pieces for many journals, magazines and newspapers, and he is currently finishing a book on ethnographic methods.