CEWS Profile: Sean Jacobs

Professor Sean Jacobs is an Assistant Professor in Communications at the University of Michigan.  He was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1969 and studied journalism and mass politics at the University of Cape Town. He was the first black journalist to be hired for the newsroom by the Afrikaans language newspaper, Die Burger as apartheid was crumbling in the early 1990s.   Following a successful career in journalism, Professor Jacobs won a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue an M.A. in Political Science from Northwestern University.   After working as a researcher for the Institute of Democracy in South Africa, he then received a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of London.  His larger interests are media and political power in liberal democracies, social movements and the politics of identity, as well as intellectual history. Before coming to the University of Michigan, he was a postdoctoral fellow of the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University and held fellowships at the Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research.  He co-edited Thabo Mbeki's World: The Ideology and Politics of the South African President (published in 2002 by Zed Books).