Lecturer, Department of Sociology, University of Southern California

Dr. Jeb Middlebrook is a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity, and a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. He also works as a Lecturer at California State University, Dominguez Hills; and as an online Lecturer for the Department of Sociology, the Women's and Ethnic Studies Program, and the Graduate Certificate Program in Diversity, Social Justice, and Inclusion at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Currently, at USC, he is a teaching assistant for the courses, "Public Policy and Criminal Justice" and "Social Inequality: Class, Status, and Power"; at CSUDH, he teaches "Deviant Behavior"; and at UCCS, he is is an online Lecturer for the courses, "The Culture of Incarceration" and "Class, Stratification, and Power."

Dr. Middlebrook is the recent recipient of the Learning Environments Incentive Grant in Sociology from the Center for Scholarly Technology; and the Award for Excellence in Teaching in American Studies and Ethnicity, both at the University of Southern California. He also holds the honored position of Executive Director of the Solid@rity Institute, a digital institute that uses research, education, and community organizing to connect diverse constituencies in a collective vision for social justice.

His current book manuscript is titled, Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and White: Autonomous-Affiliate Organizing and Multiracial Movement-Making. The manuscript analyzes strategic uses of race by radical and revolutionary, community organizers of color and white organizers from 1960 to 2011, in their attempts to build multiracial social justice movements. Jeb is also working on another book project, Prison Music: Containment, Escape, and the Sound of America, which explores the aesthetics of prison in U.S. culture from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The project synthesizes and analyzes prison themes in popular music genres including blues, country, rock, and hip-hop; prison-focused television and film; prison reform and abolition movements; and criminal justice policies and practices.

Jeb lectures nationally through the Institute for Democratic Education and Culture on topics of race, social movements, and popular culture with colleagues such as Angela Davis, the late Howard Zinn, Winona LaDuke, Sonia Sanchez, Van Jones, Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill, and Alice Walker. Jeb's research and teaching interests span the disciplines of sociology, history, and anthropology and includes topics such as race and ethnicity, social movements, social systems, transnationalism, intersectionality (race, class, gender, sexuality), popular culture, incarceration, music, archives, and ethnography. Dr. Middlebrook has given talks to thousands of people at campuses across the United States including Yale University; University of California, Berkeley; and the Universities of Minnesota, Missouri, and Kansas.

From 2008-2010, Dr. Middlebrook worked as managing editor of American Quarterly: The Journal of the American Studies Association, and was part of the editorial team that won Journal Issue of the Year in 2008 from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals for the Special Issue, Nation and Migration: Past and Future. From 2006-2008 and in 2011, he worked as a teaching assistant for college classes on race and ethnicity in the departments of American Studies and Ethnicity, Anthropology, and Sociology at the University of Southern California including “America, the Frontier, and the New West”, “Race and Class in Los Angeles," “Exploring Culture Through Film”, and "Social Problems."

Dr. Middlebrook has been published by American Quarterly and Greenwood Press, and has received national recognition for his work from the Ford Foundation, the Harry S. Truman Foundation, NBC, ABC, Associated Press, MTV Networks, Complex Magazine, and Hot 97 Radio in New York. He has been featured in the television program VH1’s The (White) Rapper Show, the film Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible, and the books Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America and Beacons in the Storm: White Educator Activists Working for Racial Justice.