Awards

Titled Professor - 2020

Ruth Norman Halls Professor

About Jason Baird Jackson

Jason Baird Jackson earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University (IU) in 1998. He joined the IU faculty in 2004 as an assistant professor of folklore and ethnomusicology and an adjunct professor of anthropology. He was promoted to associate professor in 2006 and full professor in 2016. He served as the director of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures from 2013 to 2020. In July 2020, he earned the additional, honorary title of Ruth Norman Halls Professor.

As a folklorist, ethnologist, and museum anthropologist his work centers on expressive culture and its many ramifications in the social lives of Indigenous peoples, particularly those whose homelands are in the present-day Southern United States. Conceptually and theoretically his work is concerned with topics such as appropriation, traditionalization, heritage, and intellectual and cultural property.

Throughout his career, he has concurrently filled professorial roles and curatorial ones in museum ethnography. He has curated or co-curated more than twenty special exhibitions as well as published two monographs, three edited volumes, and more than 120 articles in journals and edited collections. Active in scholarly communication, he has served previously as editor of the Journal of Folklore Research and of Museum Anthropology and he is the founding editor of Museum Anthropology Review. In addition to his work with that journal, he is also the founding editor of the Material Vernaculars book series published by Indiana University Press. He directs the Material Culture and Heritage Studies Laboratory and has frequently served as a visiting faculty member for the National Science Foundation-supported Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian institution’s National Museum of Natural History, where he is also a research associate.

Active professionally within folklore studies and anthropology both nationally and internationally, he was a Fulbright Specialist for the University of Tartu in Estonia and he is central to numerous ongoing exchange and research projects linking folklorists and museum ethnographers in China and the United States. Among his honors is an election to the Fellows of the American Folklore Society and recognition with the IU Graduate and Professional Student Government’s Faculty Mentor Award. He is particularly proud of his work with graduate students having advised more than seventy-five doctoral and master’s degree students. In 2014, Baird Jackson received a Trustees’ Teaching Award from IU to recognize his outstanding teaching.