Reginald Jackson

As a scholar, Reginald Jackson care about the praxis of reading better: developing more creative, critically sensitive ways to engage texts. In this vein, Jackson's research and teaching explore legibility as a generative concept. The main venue for this inquiry is medieval Japan, though his current projects turn to early modern and contemporary texts. Dr. Jackson's research on premodern Japanese culture traverses three fields: literature, art history, and performance studies. Specifically, he concentrates on legibility’s relation to embodiment. Animating Jackson's research is this basic question: "How should bodies be read?" While he attempts to address the ethical, methodological, and disciplinary contours of this question plot a cursive path, all of Jackson's scholarly work examines relationships between embodiment and legibility to some degree: in late-Heian handscrolls, medieval dance-drama, Afro-Asian sculpture, slide guitar, contemporary choreography, and The Tale of Genji.