Jelani Cobb

Jelani Cobb joined the Columbia Journalism School faculty in 2016 and became Dean in 2022.
He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He received a Peabody Award for his
2020 PBS Frontline film Whose Vote Counts? and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in
Commentary in 2018. He has also been a political analyst for MSNBC since 2019.

He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and To
the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He is the editor or co-editor of several
volumes including The Matter of Black Lives, a collection of The New Yorker’s writings on race
and The Essential Kerner Commission Report. He is producer or co-producer on a number of
documentaries including Lincoln’s Dilemma, Obama: A More Perfect Union and Policing the
Police.

Dr. Cobb was educated at Jamaica High School in Queens, NY, Howard University, where he
earned a B.A. in English, and Rutgers University, where he completed his MA and doctorate in
American History in 2003. He is also a recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the
Fulbright Foundation and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of
Government.