Dr. Hamilton joined the Media Studies faculty in the Fall of 2014 and has a joint appointment with the American Studies program. He is a cultural historian who studies sound, media, and popular culture, and his other areas of interest include film, sports, television, and journalism. His first book, Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Harvard UP, 2016), focused on the transatlantic interplay of popular music and racial thought during the 1960s, and explores how rock and roll music moved from an interracial form to being widely understood as a "white" one by the end of the decade. Since its publication Just around Midnight has received Honorable Mention for the Woody Guthrie Award (Outstanding Book) from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, won a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Award, and been chosen as one of the three best non-fiction books of 2016 by Splice Magazine. In 2017 PopMatters named Just around Midnight one of the “10 Conversation-Shifting Books about Music” of the past ten years. Dr. Hamilton is currently working on a book about music and technology since the 1960s.

Since 2013 he has also been the pop critic for Slate magazine where he writes about music, sports, and other areas of culture, and in 2016 he hosted the Slate podcast series “Pop, Race, and the ‘60s”. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NPR, ESPN, Transition, L.A. Review of Books, and many other venues. Prior to arriving at UVA he received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, and was the inaugural postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Colorado - Boulder's Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture.

Jack Hamilton is a member of the Graduate Faculty.