PHILADELPHIA -- John L. Jackson Jr. has been named the first Penn Integrates Knowledge professor at the University of Pennsylvania.  Jackson is currently at Duke University.  

At Penn, he will become the Richard Perry University Associate Professor of Communications and Anthropology, holding joint appointments in Penn's Annenberg School for Communication and School of Arts and Sciences. He will also be affiliated with the Center for Africana Studies.

Penn Integrates Knowledge is a University-wide initiative to recruit exceptional faculty members whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge across disciplines.

"We are delighted to announce John Jackson as the University's first PIK professor," President Amy Gutmann said.  He has very quickly established himself as a leading scholar of cultural anthropology and a documentary filmmaker.  John's work brings new perspectives to bear on our understanding of race, class and visual communication. We see Dr. Jackson's arrival at Penn as a perfect marriage between an original scholar in race studies, urban anthropology and popular culture and a University at the forefront of integrating knowledge across multiple disciplines."

Jackson is currently a Fellow with the National Humanities Center.  At Duke, he is an associate professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology, with a secondary appointment in African and African American Studies.  He was previously  a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.

"Professor Jackson truly embodies the spirit of the PIK program, having taken a multidisciplinary approach to his study of the experience of black America, Provost Ronald Daniels said.  "His joint appointment promotes important intellectual ties between the Annenberg School and the School of Arts and Sciences."

Jackson is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Award; the Lilly Endowment Fellowship, National Humanities Center; the William F. Milton Fund, Harvard Medical School; and the National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.  As a filmmaker, he has also produced a nationally distributed documentary, several internationally screened film shorts and an award-winning 16mm feature film. Jackson's publications include "Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity" and "Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America."

"It is quite a privilege to be offered such an expansive academic appointment," Jackson said.  "Penn's serious commitments to interdisciplinarity certainly serve to reinforce my own attempts to work in ways that transcend some of the conventional limits of academic disciplines, departments and schools.  Penn is the perfect institution for intellectual pursuits that methodologically and thematically traverse the boundaries of traditional fields."

Jackson received his Ph.D. (with distinction) in anthropology from Columbia University in 2000.  He graduated from Howard University summa cum laude with a B.A. in communications in 1993.

The PIK program was launched by Gutmann in 2005.  The first four chairs established under that program are funded by a gift from Penn Trustee Richard Perry, founder of the investment management firm Perry Capital.