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IU Bloomington

Jason Baird Jackson

College of Arts and Sciences /Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Department of Anthropology

Expert Bio

Jason Baird Jackson, the Ruth N. Halls Professor of Folklore and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington, is a folklorist and ethnologist whose work bridges the fields of folklore studies, cultural anthropology, ethnohistory and museum studies. He has collaborated with Native American communities in Oklahoma since 1993, when he began a lifelong personal and research relationship with the Yuchi people.

His studies concern, most centrally, the nature of customary arts, practices and beliefs, and the role these play in social life. In addition to the ethnography and ethnology of Eastern North America, he pursues projects exploring emerging issues (often quite contested) in the areas of intellectual property, cultural property and heritage policy.

Much of his career has been spent working as a curator and director in museum contexts, and he remains deeply engaged with research in, and teaching about, museums, especially museums of world cultures and ethnography. He served as the editor of the journal Museum Anthropology from 2005 to 2009, and he founded and now edits (2007-present) the journal Museum Anthropology Review. He is also the editor of the Material Vernaculars book series, the author numerous publications, and the curator and co-curator of many exhibitions.

Areas of Expertise

Museums, museums in society, material culture (things, objects, architecture, etc.), heritage and heritage policy, cultural property, intellectual property, repatriation, cultural change, ritual, ceremony, festival, performance, folklore, folklife, cultural anthropology, social anthropology, folklore studies, ethnology, museum anthropology, ethnography, publishing, scholarly publishing, open access, scholarly journals, China, United States, indigenous peoples, Native America, revitalization, graduate education, alt-metrics.

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