Sarah J. Jackson Awarded 2025 Fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study

In April 2025, Sarah J. Jackson, Associate Professor of Communication, was awarded a one-year fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), one of the world’s foremost centers for intellectual inquiry.

Jackson, who is also co-director of the Media, Inequality, and Change Center, studies how media, journalism, and technology represent and are used by marginalized groups. Her research focuses on how communication from Black, feminist and activist spaces contributes to U.S. progress.

As a Fellow in the School of Social Science at IAS, she will consider how digital theory and African American history are interlinked — from ties between digital migration and the geographic mass migrations of African Americans to comparisons between online virality and the spread of early Black media, such as slave narratives. She will also explore the ways that racist pseudoscience was historically debunked in Black media and how this can inform how to fight disinformation now.

Each year, IAS welcomes more than 250 of the most distinguished scholars worldwide to conduct research at the renowned research institution in Princeton, New Jersey.

As an IAS Fellow, Jackson joins a prestigious group of scholars that includes 36 Nobel Laureates, 46 of the 64 Fields Medalists, and 23 of the 28 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellows, winners of the Turing Award, and the Wolf, Holberg, Kluge, and Pulitzer Prizes.

Other Annenberg scholars who have received IAS Fellowships include Assistant Professors Juan Llamas-Rodriguez and Julia Ticona, who were 2023-24 Members in the School of Social Science.