John L. Jackson

John L. Jackson, Jr., Provost and Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is an urban ethnographer, scholar of visual culture, filmmaker, and anthropologist of race. Before arriving at Penn, he was a member of the cultural anthropology department at Duke University and a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.

Jackson has published six books, including Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (Harvard University Press, 2013) and Impolite Conversations: On Race, Class, Sex, Religion, and Politics (Atria Books, 2017), the latter co-authored with Cora Daniels. Jackson is a producer and/or director of 10 films, including Making Sweet Tea, about the lives and loves of Black gay men in the South, and Bad Friday: Rastafari After Coral Gardens. At Penn, he helped co-found the Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts and the Center for Experimental Ethnography.

He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University and his B.A. in Communications from Howard University.