Biography
Matthew Jesse Jackson, past chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago for two terms between 2018 and 2025, teaches courses grounded primarily in the contemplation of cultural experience since 1945. He is the author of The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes (University of Chicago Press, 2010; new paperback edition, 2016), winner of the Robert Motherwell Book Award from The Dedalus Foundation for outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts, as well as the Vucinich Book Prize for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; the prize citation reads, in part: “Matthew Jesse Jackson's The Experimental Group is an engaging, beautifully written, and erudite study of unofficial Soviet art. It provides brilliant readings of numerous individual drawings, albums, mixed media work, and installations…[T]his monumental study of creativity in and after the late Soviet period is a remarkable scholarly achievement.” The volume was also named runner-up for Book of the Year in art history and criticism at the American Publishers (PROSE) Awards and placed on the short list for Book of the Year by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL). Jackson earned a Ph.D. in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley, studying as a University Humanities Fellow under the guidance of Anne M. Wagner and T.J. Clark. He is also A.B.D. in Russian Literature, having been awarded M.Phil. and M.A. degrees from Columbia University, where he studied as a President’s Fellow and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa summa cum laude with a B.A. in French and German from the Florida State University.
