Bio
Jason Sokol grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, the birthplace of basketball. He attended Oberlin College, and double-majored in History and Philosophy. Jason graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1999 with Highest Honors in History. From 1997 to 2000, he worked variously for the Springfield Union-News, the New Haven Advocate, and The Nation. Jason's writings on American history, politics, and race have appeared in those publications, among many others.
He received his doctorate in American History from the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Leon Litwack. His dissertation would become the basis for There Goes My Everything. Jason moved to Brooklyn, New York in 2005 and served as a Non-Resident Fellow at Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute.
Jason was a Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University from 2006 to 2008. He is now a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses in 20th-century U.S. History. Jason has begun work on a new book project about politics and race in the Northeast.
He lives in Philadelphia with the playwright Nina Louise Morrison.
Jason was recently named one of America's "Top Young Historians" by the
History News Network:
See the recent article, "Interpreting Some Overlooked Stories from the South," in
The New York Times: