Audit and Investment Committees

Jelani Cobb

Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism, Columbia Journalism School

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.