Ph.D. Harvard University 2022

M.Phil. University of Cambridge 2014

M.Sc. University of Oxford 2013

B.A. University of Maine at Farmington 2008

Specialties

Sebastian Jackson is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a Faculty Affiliate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. Trained as a historian and sociocultural anthropologist, Jackson’s research and teaching interests are concerned with questions of race and racism, intimacy, belonging, and the unfolding legacies of settler colonial domination in the Atlantic world, and especially in South Africa and the United States. Jackson’s book project, entitled “Realizing the Rainbow Nation: Negotiating Race, Intimacy, and Belonging in South Africa,” examines the social history and cultural afterlives of apartheid’s so-called “Immorality Laws,” which prohibited marriages and sexual relationships across racial boundaries from 1949 to 1985.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, conducted in Cape Town and Stellenbosch between 2012 and 2020, Jackson considers how the dispensation of democracy in 1994, the gradual desegregation of public spaces, the development of digital technologies, and the global circulation of audiovisual media have created new opportunities for intimacy, romantic love, and kinship across entrenched racial divisions which continue to shape the post-apartheid landscape.