This fall, Annenberg School for Communication associate professor Sarah J. Jackson will begin a one-year fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), one of the world’s foremost centers for intellectual inquiry.

Each year, IAS welcomes more than 250 of the most promising postdoctoral researchers and distinguished scholars worldwide to conduct research in the fields of mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences, and historical studies.

Dr. Jackson studies the ways media, journalism, and technology represent and are used by marginalized publics. Her research focuses on how communication arising from Black, feminist, and activist spaces contributes to U.S. progress.

As member of the School of Social Science in IAS, she will pursue three interdisciplinary lines of inquiry at the intersection of digital theory and African American history and culture, aligning with the school’s 2025-2026 theme, “Digital (In)Equality.”

Her project will connect contemporary questions of virality to the spread of early Black media, such as slave narratives. She will also bring together literature on digital migration and geographic mass migrations of African Americans and also hopes to explore the connection between the debunking of racist pseudoscience in Black media and intellectual labor to reframe how we understand the fight against disinformation.

Among past and present IAS scholars, there have been 36 Nobel laureates, 46 Fields medalists, and 23 Abel Prize laureates, as well as MacArthur and Guggenheim fellows and winners of the Turing Award and the Wolf, Holberg, Kluge, and Pulitzer Prizes.