Lauren Michele Jackson, National Fellow, is an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University and contributing writer at the New Yorker. She is the author of White Negroes, which was short-listed for the 2020 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. Her essays and criticism have also been published in New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, 4Columns, and elsewhere. She is an alum of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and received her PhD in English from the University of Chicago. For her fellowship, she worked on Back: An American Tale, a collection of essays on American history’s belabored cores. Back is forthcoming from Amistad Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.
Selected Work
- The Messy Politics of Black Voices - and “Black Voice” in American Animation: An essay for the New Yorker considering the sonic problem of representing race, as prompted by recent reckonings over diversity in voice acting.
- When Black People Appear on Seinfeld: An essay dedicated to the minor characters of one of America’s favorite TV shows for Vulture.
- Kim Kardashian and the Year of Unchecked Privilege-Checking: A year in review on exculpatory powers of social critique in the New Yorker.
- The Importance of Being Megan Thee Stallion: A cover story for Harper’s Bazaar profiling Houston's very own.