SIS Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Inquiry Patrick Thaddeus Jackson is the winner of American University’s Outstanding Scholarship, Research, Creative Activity, and Other Professional Contributions Award for 2026, one of eleven prestigious university-wide honors awarded to one faculty member from any of AU’s eight schools.

To Jackson, a scholar of international relations theory and the philosophy of knowledge, among many other things, receiving this university award shows that his work is appreciated beyond the narrower academic field in which he has spent his career.

“Most scholars know how our work is received by our colleagues within our discipline, but to have that be recognized by people from different areas of thought and different schools is humbling,” Jackson said. “To have a broader community that is able to read across disciplines and recognize me as having made a contribution is deeply gratifying, and I’m very happy to receive that from the university.”

The multi-disciplinarity of SIS, where Jackson is actively involved and serves as Chair of the Department of Global Inquiry, helped set him up for success in his research and professional contributions. Its more fluid structure allowed him the freedom to pursue his creative scholarship that often looks different from other work in his field.

“The things I work on—the philosophy of science, popular culture, questions of culture and identity—are not exactly the mainstream questions of my discipline," Jackson said. “If I were in a purely disciplinary environment, I’m not sure I would have been able to do the work I have done for as long as I have done it. But SIS doesn’t have that pressure, and I’ve found it much more intellectually rewarding to be able to do work that is a little ‘off kilter’.”

Jackson points to his current book project on Star Wars as an example of that creative freedom. The book positions the Star Wars franchise as a cultural critique of the ideas of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism in the United States and explores the ways that popular culture artifacts can function as critiques of the assumptions that people take into politics and policy.

“What people sometimes miss, by dismissing Star Wars as a piece of entertainment, is that the franchise also has a conceptual underpinning which is very much in tension with notions like exceptionalism and manifest-destiny,” Jackson explained. “Everyone in Star Wars that claims to be sanctified by the mystical universe—the ‘chosen ones’—are the bad guys, and the whole saga can really be seen as a cultural criticism of things that are going on in the U.S.”

Besides his creative and rigorous research pursuits, Jackson’s recognition for the award also includes how he has contributed to the professional world of international affairs teaching. For 22 years, Jackson has run a workshop for graduate students at the Northeast International Studies Association Annual Meeting, which focuses on helping students do the kind of work that is often not covered in basic graduate methodology classes, such as interpretive, relational, and ethnographic methodological approaches. Through the workshop, students are able to learn about other types of techniques and get feedback from people working in those methodologies about how to improve their project.

“Fundamentally, I believe that international affairs is a multi-discipline field, and it’s important that people understand that there are multiple ways of doing things that all have their distinct senses of process and rigor,” Jackson said. “Someone saying, ‘I wouldn’t do it that way, but that’s cool’ is a goal and core value commitment of mine that comes out in my research work but also in this professional organizing work and methodological seminars.”