Bruce Jackson (scholar)

Last updated
Bruce Jackson
Brucejackson.jpg
Born (1936-05-21) May 21, 1936 (age 87)
Occupation(s)SUNY Distinguished Professor; James Agee Professor of American Culture, documentary film maker, photographer
Employer University at Buffalo
Website brucejackson.us

Bruce Jackson (born May 21, 1936) 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. [1] He has also directed and produced five documentary films. He is an Associate Member of The Wooster Group (New York).

Contents

Biography

Jackson was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1936. [2] He served in the United States Marine Corps from 1953–1956, then attended Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) 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 (1971), was nominated for a Grammy Award (1974) for Best Ethnic Traditional Recording (Wake Up Dead Man: Black Convict Work Songs), named an Associate Member of the Folklore Fellows by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters (1995), and Chevalier in l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (2002). In 2012, the president of France appointed him chevalier in the National Order of Merit. [3] He was president of the American Folklore Society in 1984. [4] He was also chairman of the board of trustees of the American Folklore Center in the Library of Congress (1988–89, trustee 1984-89), and director, then trustee of the Newport Folk Foundation (1965—).

With Diane Christian, he has directed and produced five documentary films: Death Row (1979), Creeley (1988), Out of Order (1983), Robert Creeley: Willy's Reading (1982), and William August May (1982).

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 (Korea(, Buffalo, Los Angeles and Brooklyn.

His photographs mainly focus on prison life. A photo collection from the Cummins Unit in Arkansas was exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. [5] Other recent exhibitions are Being There (Burchfield Penney Art Center, 2012), Portraits from a Prison (Arkansas Studies Institute, 2009), American Gulag (Lega di Cultura di Piadena and Circolo Gianni Bosio, Rome, 2007), Bridging Buffalo (Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, 2006–2007), and Mirrors (Nina Freudenheim Gallery, 2004).

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. He is also an affiliate professor in the UB Department of Media Studies. 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

Published works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Creeley</span> American poet

Robert White Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf, and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo. Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Buffalo, and Providence, where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Buffalo State University</span> Public university in Buffalo, New York

The State University of New York Buffalo State University is a public university in Buffalo, New York. It is part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system. Buffalo State University was founded in 1871 as the Buffalo Normal School to train teachers. It offers 79 undergraduate majors with 11 honors options, 11 post baccalaureate teacher certification programs, and 64 graduate programs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leslie Fiedler</span> American literary critic (1917–2003)

Leslie Aaron Fiedler was an American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. His work incorporates the application of psychological theories to American literature. Fiedler's best known work is the book Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). A retrospective article on Leslie Fiedler in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to Love and Death in the American Novel as "one of the great, essential books on the American imagination ... an accepted major work." This work views in depth both American literature and character from the time of the American Revolution to the present. From it, there emerges Fiedler's once scandalous—now increasingly accepted—judgement that American literature is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death.

Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Burchfield Penney Art Center</span> Art museum in New York, United States

The Burchfield Penney Art Center, or just the Burchfield Penney, is an arts and educational institution part of Buffalo State University, located adjacent to the main campus in Buffalo, New York, United States. Dedicated to the art and vision of American painter Charles E. Burchfield, it was founded in 1966 as the Charles E. Burchfield Center. The center features a museum, library, and activity space for the arts. It maintains the world's largest collection of Burchfield's work, as well as many other distinguished artists of Buffalo, Niagara and Western New York. It is engaged with every aspect of Buffalo and the region's rich cultural activity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cummins Unit</span> Unincorporated community in Arkansas, United States

The Cummins Unit is an Arkansas Department of Corrections prison in unincorporated Lincoln County, Arkansas, United States, in the Arkansas Delta region. It is located along U.S. Route 65, near Grady, Gould, and Varner, 28 miles (45 km) south of Pine Bluff, and 60 miles (97 km) southeast of Little Rock.

Michael Kelleher is an American poet. He is the author of four collections of poems, Visible Instruments, Museum HoursHuman Scale and To Be Sung. His poems and essays have appeared at The Brooklyn Rail, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, The Colorado Review, ecopoetics, and many others. He has read his work throughout the U.S., in Canada, the U.K., and Africa, and also as part of the Encuentro del Poesia Del Lenguaje in Havana, Cuba, in 2001. With Ammiel Alcalay, he founded OlsonNow, a project devoted to the poetry and poetics of Charles Olson. From 2008-2013, he produced a blog project called "Aimless Reading", in which he daily photographed, catalogued, and wrote about the more than 1200 titles in his personal library. He is the former Artistic Director of Just Buffalo Literary Center, where in 2007 he founded Babel, an international author lecture series, at which he conducted live, on-stage interviews with authors such as Orhan Pamuk, V.S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie. In 2012, he was appointed the founding Director of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Tardos</span> French-born American poet, visual artist, academic and composer

Anne Tardos is a French-born American poet, visual artist, academic, and composer.

Tom Clark was an American poet, editor and biographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jet Lowe</span> American photographer (born 1946)

John T. "Jet" Lowe is an American photographer. He is one of the photographers employed by the U.S. National Park Service on the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) projects, and was the supervisor of engineering photography for HAER until his retirement in July 2013. His book, Industrial Eye: Photographs by Jet Lowe from the Historic American Engineering Record was published in 1986 by the Preservation Press.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthony Bannon</span> American museum director (born 1943)

Anthony Bannon is an arts administrator in Western New York. He served as the director of the George Eastman Museum from 1996 to 2012 as well as the executive director of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College. During his tenure at the George Eastman Museum, Bannon launched programs in photo and film preservation, acquired the Technicolor and Merchant Ivory Productions archives, and established an online presence for the museum's classic images.

Michael Basinski is an American text, visual and sound poet. He was the curator of The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo. He performs as a solo poet and with the performance/sound ensemble, Bufffluxus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Goree Unit</span> Mens prison in Huntsville, Texas

The Thomas Goree Unit (GR) is a Texas Department of Criminal Justice men's prison, located in Huntsville, Texas, 4 miles (6.4 km) south of downtown Huntsville on Texas State Highway 75 South. The Goree Unit is located within Region I. First opened in 1911, it served as the only women's correctional facility in Texas until 1982, after the women were moved to state prisons in Gatesville. For a period Goree held the state's sole female death row inmate, until her conviction was changed to a non-capital offense. There was more than one death row female at Goree in 1979.

James K.Y. Kuo was a Chinese-born painter who came to the United States in 1947. Kuo was known as a "lyrical abstract painter...who exhibited his work at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery," the China Institute and the Elliott Museum and taught for many years at Daemen College in Amherst, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jan Williams</span>

Jan Williams is a percussionist, arts administrator, teacher, conductor, and composer who has championed avant-garde and progressive music in the United States. He is recognized as an important proponent of percussion performance and its literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BlazeVOX Books</span> American publishing company

BlazeVOX Books, often stylized as BlazeVOX [books], is an independent publisher founded by Geoffrey Gatza and based in Buffalo, New York. Since 2000, it has published more than 350 books of poetry and prose, most of which fall within the sphere of avant-garde literature.

Terrell Don Hutto, known as T. Don Hutto, was an American businessman and one of the three co-founders of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), whose establishment marked the beginning of the private prison industry during the era of former President Ronald Reagan. In 1983, Hutto, Robert Crants and Tom Beasley formed CCA and received investments from Jack C. Massey, the founder of Hospital Corporation of America, Vanderbilt University, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The T. Don Hutto Residential Center, one of CCA's detention centers, was named after him.

Geoffrey Lea Winningham is an American photographer, journalist, and filmmaker best known for his photographs and documentary films focusing on Texas and Mexican culture. Geoff's work was first recognized in the early 1970s when he published the book Friday Night in the Coliseum, featuring his photographs of professional wrestling and recorded conversations with wrestlers and fans. The book was followed in 1972 by a 16mm, black and white documentary film of the same title. 

<i>In This Timeless Time</i> Novel

In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America is a 2012 book by Bruce Jackson and Diana Christian, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alberto Rey</span> American artist and filmmaker

Alberto Rey is a Cuban-American painter, illustrator, filmmaker, educator and writer. His work has been featured in over 200 exhibitions and screenings and has been included in the permanent collections of twenty museums including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, El Museo del Barrio, Extremaduran and Latin American Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Museum of Latin American Art, and the Peabody Essex Museum. Rey is currently a distinguished professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia and in 2012 was inducted into the Burchfield Penney Art Center's Living Legacy Project. He has written several books corresponding to series of his work: Candaway Creek - Western New York (2021), Lost Beauty: Icebergs (2021), Lost Beauty: Part II - The Art of Museum Stories (2021), Extinct Birds Project (2018), and Complexities of Water - Biological Regionalism: Bagmati River, Kathmandu Valley, Nepal (2016) about the holiest and most polluted river Bagmati River in Kathmandu, Nepal. He has also had many articles and illustrations published in several magazines including the Buffalo Spree, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Art of Angling Journal, Fish and Fly Magazine, American Angler, and Saltwater Fisherman.

Rayna Diane Green is an American curator and folklorist. She is Curator Emerita, in the Division of Cultural and Community Life at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

References

  1. World Cat author listing
  2. "Library of Congress Name Authority File" . Retrieved July 23, 2015.
  3. Wuetcher, Sue (March 14, 2013). "Jackson receives one of France's highest honors". University at Buffalo . Retrieved 23 July 2015.[ permanent dead link ]
  4. "AFS Presidents". American Folklore Society. Archived from the original on April 19, 2018. Retrieved July 23, 2015.
  5. Speakeasy: Bruce Jackson on how he became the dean of prison folklore, The Wall Street Journal , 2010-09-04.