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Humanities Institute honors Bruce Jackson
Acclaimed folklorist, documentary filmmaker and photographer Bruce Jackson will be honored at the 2011 Scholar Session presented by UB’s Humanities Institute at 7 p.m. Nov. 4 in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
The session will be followed by a special photography exhibition of Jackson’s work “Full Color Depression: First Kodachromes from America’s Heartland,” which will run at the Albright-Knox through Jan. 22. The session and exhibit are free and open to the public.
Each year since 2006, the Scholar Session has honored one outstanding UB faculty member and showcased his or her work to the local community by bringing renowned scholars to Buffalo to discuss the honoree’s work. This year’s honoree, Jackson, is a SUNY Distinguished Professor and the James Agee Professor of American Culture. The event is titled “Being There: The Work of Bruce Jackson.”
A professor in UB’s English department, Jackson has written or edited more than 30 books in the fields of folklore, ethnography, sociology and photography. A Grammy nominee, he also is a documentary photographer and filmmaker. His most recent books are “Pictures from a Drawer: Prison and the Art of Portraiture” (2009) and “The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories” (2007). Much of his work has been in collaboration with his wife, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Diane Christian, who is also a UB professor of English. His next book, co-authored with Christian, “In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America,” will be published in spring 2012, to be followed by the 2013 release of “Inside the Wire: Prison Photographs 1962-2001.”
Jackson has been named chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, has served as president of the American Folklore Society, editor of the Journal of American Folklore and chairman of the board of trustees of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress.
This year’s guest scholars are Tom Rankin and William Ferris. Rankin, a professor at Duke University and director of the Center for Documentary Studies, is a distinguished documentary photographer, filmmaker and folklorist. He has been a long-time member of the board of trustees at the American Folklife Center and, like Jackson, has served as its president. Ferris, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a filmmaker, folklorist and author who co-founded the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis. He also is co-editor of “The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.”
Previous Scholar Session honorees include UB professors Rodolphe Gasché, Comparative Literature, in 2010; Carolyn Korsmeyer, Philosophy, in 2008; and Dennis Tedlock, English/Anthropology, in 2006.
For more information about the Scholar Sessions, visit the Humanities Institute’s website.
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