Dr. Jackson is an African historian by training who has been traveling to Africa, particularly southern Africa, for over twenty-years.  Her research focuses on questions of gender and power and has covered topics like the history of colonial mental health, colonial public health, the policing of African women's bodies and the politics of sexuality in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe.  She has written a book on the history of psychiatry and the asylum in colonial Zimbabwe.  Her current research falls within the fields of contemporary African history, women and gender studies and refugees from Sudan.  She recently returned from a visit to the Kakuma Refugee Camp, funded in part by the International Center on Responses to Catastrophes, where she worked in collaboration with groups like the Kenyan Refugee Consortium, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) protection officers, the International Organization of Migration and the Lutherine World Federation.  In pursuit of this research and other research and programming endeavors, she built working relationships with scholars, activists and non-governmental organizations throughout the U.S., in Britain, South Africa and Kenya.  She currently visited universities and other research institutions in South Africa towards the development of a six-week study abroad program on comparative peoples' movements based in South Africa.  She is on the Chicago Human Rights Watch committee, and has recently been invited to join the board of the Chicago-based Heartland Alliance.  At UIC, she is the chair of UIC International Studies Minors Program and an Associate Professor in the departments of Gender and Women's Studies and African American Studies. 

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• Curriculum vitae