University of Houston-Downtown / Academics / College of Humanities & Social Sciences / Undergraduate Programs / English / Chuck Jackson

Chuck Jackson

Associate Professor of English
Coordinator, B.A. in English

Office: S1039
713-221-8615
jacksonchar@uhd.edu

Scholarships

Chuck Jackson is an Associate Professor of English. He coordinates the BA in English and the film studies concentration and minor at UHD. His main areas of research and publication include the twentieth-century African American novel and short story, the Southern gothic, the mid-century US horror film, and, more recently, experimental Black and Chicanx filmmaking from the 1970s and 1980s.

PhD English, Rice University, 2001
MA English, Rice University, 1998
BA English and Textual Studies, Syracuse University, 1993

ENG 4327: Advanced Film Studies (as Race, Ethnicity, and US Film, US Horrors, and Cinematic Mood)

ENG 3357: Film Theory

ENG 3354: Introduction to Film Studies

ENG 2309: Survey of Film

ENG 2305: Literature and Culture (as American Horror Stories)

ENG 1301: Composition I

Summary of Qualifications:

Chuck Jackson earned a Ph.D. in English in 2001 from Rice University, with a focus on 20^th-century US literature and film, critical theory, and cultural studies. His scholarship on US literature, film, and culture has been published in some of the most prestigious, peer-reviewed academic journals in his field -- African American Review, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Modern Fiction Studies, Faulkner Journal, camera obscura, Gothic Studies, Pedagogy, and Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Black Camera: An International Film Journal and Film Studies. He has been teaching US literature and film studies at university-level English departments for over twenty years. From 2014-2017, he piloted a Book Circle program centered on the works of Richard Wright with incarcerated men at Kegans State Jail (now Kegans Intermediate Sanctions Facility). In 2009, he won the UHD Award for Teaching Excellence. His scholarship has been supported with several in-house grants from UHD, including Organized Research Grants, Faculty Development Grants, and Faculty Development Leave. In 2019, he won a Visiting Research Fellowship with the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University-Bloomington to study the films of the little-known Black feminist film maker Jessie Maple.

PUBLICATIONS

"Petrification and Petroleum: Affect, the Gas Pump, and U.S. Horror Films (1956-1973)," Film Studies 21 (Autumn 2019), 38-52.

“The Touch of the ‘First’ Black Cinematographer in North America: James E. Hinton, Ganja & Hess, and the NEA Films at the Harvard Film Archive.” Black Camera: An International Film Journal. 10.1 (Fall 2018), 67-95.

"What Blooms: The Jailhouse, Inside Out," Studies in Law, Politics, and Society (Spec. Issue on The Beautiful Prison). Ed. Austin Sarat. Intro. Doran Larson. 64 (April/May 2014), 87-96.

"What Looms: The University, the Jailhouse, and Pedagogy," Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 9.2 (Spring 2009).

"Blood for Oil: Crude Metonymies and Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)," Gothic Studies 10.1 (May 2008).

"Star Hole (for Courtney Love)," Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 22.65 [2] (Summer 2007).

"American Emergencies: Whiteness, the National Guard, and Light in August" The Faulkner Journal 22.1-2 (Fall 2006, Spring 2007).

"A 'Headless Display': Sula, Soldiers, and Lynching," Modern Fiction Studies 52.2 (Summer 2006).

"Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics," African American Review 34.4 (Winter 2000).

"Little, Violent, White: The Bad Seed and the Matter of Children," The Journal of Popular Film and Television 28.2 (Summer 2000).

Research Interests

Film studies, critical theory, twentieth-century US literature (African American, Southern gothic), prison studies

Recognitions

2019 Visiting Research Fellowship, Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University, Bloomington

2013 University Funded Faculty Development Leave

2009 UHD Teaching Excellence Award, Winner

2008 UHD Teaching Excellence Award, Finalist

2010, 2011, 2012 Faculty Development Grant

2008, 2010 Organized Research Grant

Last updated 3/22/2021 6:30 AM