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 was a Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University from 2006 to 2008. He then held a Mellon fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania from 2008 to 2009. In 2010, Jason was a Resident Fellow at Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. He is currently a Harvard College Fellow.
He is working on a new book project about politics and race in the cities of the Northeast. It is entitled, "The Northern Mystique."
Jason was named one of America's "Top Young Historians" by the
History News Network:
See the article, "Interpreting Some Overlooked Stories from the South," in
The New York Times: