Jennifer Jackson - Anthropology
(Appointed Fall 2011)
Jennifer Jackson received her doctorate in 2006 from Yale University and comes to UCLA from the University of Toronto, where she held the position of Assistant Professor in the Anthropology department for four years.
Prof. Jackson's scholarly interests are as a linguistic anthropologist. Since 1994, she has focused her research in Madagascar and the U.S. Her work spans studies in semiotics, language ideologies and aesthetics, verbal and visual artistic performance in political practice as they relate to the production of democracy, civil society and the state in Madagascar as well as the US. Her work appears in publications such as the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language and Society, and Language and Communication. Funding support for her research came from the Social Science Research Council, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and other sources.
She has written a book on the recent rise and fall of the President of Madagascar and continues to work with politicians in Madagascar during the transitional government and upcoming elections. She is also publishing work concerning American political oratory, in particular the ideologies and aesthetics informing how notions of truth and violence are conveyed in oratorical address.
At UCLA, she will teach courses in language and politics, narrative and identity, and aesthetics and performance.