Lauren Jackson
Assistant Professor of English
member of the graduate faculty
- Office Hours: TBA
Biography
Lauren Michele Jackson (Ph.D. English, University of Chicago) has research and teaching interests in American and African American literary and cultural production, focusing on affect, aesthetics, and race in texts ranging from nineteenth-century romances to internet culture. Her first book, White Negroes, published with Beacon Press in 2019, was short-listed for the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. Her second book, Back: Essays on the Soul and Spine of America (Amistad/HarperCollins), explores the figure of the back in art and discourse. Her articles and criticism have appeared in The Atlantic, Journal of Popular Music Studies, The New Inquiry, New Literary History, The New Yorker, New York, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, The Point, Rolling Stone, Feminist Media Studies, the Washington Post, and The Yale Review. From 2021-22, she was a National Fellow at New America; in 2025, she received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. Since 2020 she has been a contributing writer at The New Yorker covering culture and politics.
Her next project, “The Comedown: Literary Devices After Black Literature” considers disaffection in contemporary literary works.
Specializations
African American Literature, Creative Writing Nonfiction, 20th- & 21st-century American Literature, Critical Theory
Books
