Sarah J. Jackson

Sarah J. Jackson (2019) is a scholar of race, media and activism. Her first book, “Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press,” considered the relationship between black celebrity activists and journalists. Her second, the co-authored, “#HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice,” is forthcoming with MIT Press. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as a range of other popular and academic venues. A founding member of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and former fellow at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy, Sarah is an associate professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, a faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and a 2019 New America fellow.

As a Logan Nonfiction fellow, Sarah will work on “The Revolution for Us by Us: The Stories We Tell of Black Activism,” a book in which she traces how African-American activists, intellectuals, creatives and journalists use memory and memorialization of the civil rights movement to shape public debates about #BlackLivesMatter and other contemporary racial justice efforts. This book considers whose version of black activist history informs—and limits—how we imagine social change and the powerful interventions of African-American storytellers into distorted versions of the past.