John L. Jackson, Jr., is an anthropologist, author and

filmmaker who lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Jackson is the Richard Perry University Associate Professor of Communication and Anthropology in the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Before coming to Penn, Jackson  taught in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and spent three years as a junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  

Jackson received his BA in Communications (Radio, TV, Film) from Howard University in Washington DC in 1993 and his PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University in New York City in 2000.  

As a filmmaker, Jackson has produced a feature-length fiction film, documentaries and film-shorts that have screened at film festivals internationally. 

His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Harvard University's Milton Fund, and the Lilly Endowment (during a year at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina).

Jackson is currently conducting an ethnographic project examining Global Black Hebrewism, as well as completing a book on the philosophy of qualitative social science research. He is also working on a documentary film about contemporary conspiracy theories in urban America, Novus Ordo Seclorum.