Bruce Jackson (scholar)


Bruce Jackson is an American folklorist, documentary filmmaker, writer, photographer. He is SUNY Distinguished Professor and the James Agee Professor of American Culture at the University at Buffalo. Jackson has edited or authored books published by major trade and university presses. He has also directed and produced five documentary films. He is an Associate Member of The Wooster Group.

Biography

Jackson was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1936. He served in the United States Marine Corps from 1953–1956, then attended Newark College of Engineering for three years. He received a B.A. from Rutgers University in 1960 and an M.A. from Indiana University's School of Letters in 1962. From 1963 through 1967 he was a Junior Fellow in Harvard University's Society of Fellows.
He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Ethnic Traditional Recording, named an Associate Member of the Folklore Fellows by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, and Chevalier in l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. In 2012, the president of France appointed him chevalier in the National Order of Merit. He was president of the American Folklore Society in 1984. He was also chairman of the board of trustees of the American Folklore Center in the Library of Congress, and director, then trustee of the Newport Folk Foundation.
With Diane Christian, he has directed and produced five documentary films: Death Row, Robert Creeley: Willy's Reading, William August May, Out of Order, and Creeley.
In 2017, The Wooster Group produced a play based on his 1964 recordings in Texas prisons: "The B-Side: 'Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons' A Record Album Interpretation." The play has since been performed in Taipei, Gwanju, Portraits from a Prison, American Gulag, Bridging Buffalo, and Mirrors.
His work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fund for Investigative Journalism, Playboy Foundation, Levi Strauss Foundation, Polaroid Foundation, New York Council for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society.
He has spent his academic career at the University at Buffalo. He joined it as an assistant professor of English and comparative literature in 1967, was promoted to associate professor a year later and to full professor in 1971. He received the SUNY Distinguished Professor distinction in 1990 and was appointed Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture in 1997. In 2009, he was appointed James Agee Professor of American Culture. From 2015 to 2021, he was co-director of University at Buffalo's Creative Arts Initiative.
From 1986 to 1990, Jackson was editor-in-chief of the Journal of American Folklore.

Filmography

  • Death Row
  • Robert Creeley: Willy's Reading
  • William August May
  • Out of Order
  • ''Creeley''

Published works

  • Folklore and Society
  • The Negro and his Folklore in 19th Century Periodicals
  • A Thief's Primer
  • In the Life: Versions of the Criminal Experience
  • Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons
  • "Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me": Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition
  • Killing Time: Life in the Arkansas Penitentiary
  • The Programmer
  • Death Row
  • Get the Money and Shoot: The DRI Guide to Funding Documentary Films
  • Your Father's Not Coming Home Any More
  • Doing Drugs
  • Teaching Folklore
  • Law and Disorder: Criminal Justice in America
  • Rainbow Freeware
  • Fieldwork
  • A User's Guide: Freeware, Shareware, and Public Domain Software
  • Disorderly Conduct
  • The World Observed: Reflections on the Fieldwork Process
  • The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories
  • Pictures from a Drawer: Prison and the Art of Portraiture
  • In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America
  • "Inside the Wire: Photographs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons"
  • "Being There: Bruce Jackson, Photographs, 1962-2012"
  • "Inside the Wire: Photographs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons"
  • "American Chartres: Buffalo's Waterfront Grain Elevators"
  • "Terlingua Necropolis"
  • "I Look at Diane Christian/Diane Christian looks at Me. Photographs 1971-2017"
  • "Babel: The First Ten Years,"
  • "Places: Things heard, things seen"
  • Yevtushenko in Buffalo,
  • Deux jours à La Ribaute: A Celebration at Atelier Anselm Kiefer
  • Robert Creeley on the Poet's Work. In Conversation with Bruce Jackson
  • Changing Tense: Thirty memento mori
  • Voices from Death Row, second edition
  • Ways of the Hand: A Photographer's Memoir
  • The Story is True. Expanded edition
  • Ephemera 1995-2022: On people, politics, art, justice, torture and war
  • Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me, revised ed.
  • Folklore Matters: Incursions in the Field 1965-2021
  • The Life and Death of Buffalo's Great Northern Grain Elevator: 1897-2023