Stony Brook University
Grantee
PHONE: +1(631) 632-9983
EMAIL: hisb_info@stonybrook.edu
After receiving the ACLS Sustaining Public Engagement Grant, the Humanities department at Stony Brook University launched the “Writing Beyond the Prison” project to redress the productive losses from COVID-19 to programs that support individuals and communities impacted by the carceral system. Faculty and graduate students at Stony Brook University work with community partners, Herstory Writers Workshop and the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation, to bring the voices of those most directly impacted by the carceral system into the public conversation. The University hosts a Living Archive which publishes and preserves the writings of people within the carceral ecosystem as a rich public history research and curriculum-building initiative.
Project Managers
Dr. Zebulon Miletsky
Dr. Zebulon Vance Miletsky is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies. His new book “Before Busing: A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle” is being published by the University of North Carolina Press for release in December 2022. Dr. Miletsky is an historian specializing in recent African-American History, Civil Rights and Black Power, Urban History, Mixed Race and Biracial identity, and Hip-Hop Studies. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, essays and book chapters and is currently working on an edited volume on new directions in Boston African American History and school desegregation. He holds a doctorate degree in African-American Studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Susan Scheckel
Susan Scheckel is an Associate Professor of English. Scheckel earned her Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley in 1992. After teaching at the University of Memphis and, briefly, at the University of Southern California, she came to Stony Brook in 2000. She’s committed to showing that education in the humanities provides invaluable training in the acquisition of real-world skills. She is the editor ofThe Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. (Princeton University Press, 1998), which was the recipient of 1999 South Central Modern Language Association Book Award. She also co-edited Boundaries of Affect: Ethnicity and Emotion (Humanities Institute of Stony Brook Occasional Papers Series, 2007) with E. Ann Kaplan.
Robert Chase
Robert T. Chase is Associate Professor of History. He is the author of We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America, which won four national book awards, including the Southern Historical Association’s H.L. Mitchell Book Award for most distinguished book on the southern working class; the American Society of Criminology’s Best Book Award in Critical Criminology and Social Justice; and, the Hank Lacayo Best Book in Latinx Labor from the International Latina/o Awards. He is also the editor of Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance. His next book project is a history of sheriffs in the U.S. South, Sun Belt, and British Caribbean. His work on the history of mass incarceration and state violence has been featured on MSNBC, CNN, NPR, Newsweek, and the Washington Post.
Project Coordinator
Willie Mack
Will is a Ph. D. candidate at SUNY-Stony Brook and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Black Studies Department at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His research interests focus on race, capitalism and the carceral state in twentieth-century United States. His dissertation takes a transnational approach to the development of the carceral state in Haiti and the U.S. during the 1970s through the 1990s. Will has had articles published with “Black Perspectives” the blog for the African Americans Intellectual History Society, the Society for U.S. Intellectual Society, and “Next Chapter,” the digital forum for the University of Chicago’s Race and Capitalism Project. He has also won the Organization of American Historians’ 2022 John Higham Research Fellowship Award for graduate students writing doctoral dissertation in American History.
Carceral Studies Fellows
Kara Laurene Pernicano
Kara (she/they) is a PhD student in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Her research focuses on decriminalizing mental illness and decarcerating care; she brings a socially transformative, trauma-informed approach to rethinking institutionalization and incarceration, while negotiating the complicated intersection of trauma and memory, queer/trans poetics, disability studies and carceral studies. Her work has been included in various literary magazines and gallery exhibitions, including Newtown Literary, Snapdragon, Waccamaw, The Humanities in Transition, Full Stop, the winnow magazine, ang(st), Passengers Journal, the Whitney Staff Art Show, LIC Artists’ Plaxall Gallery and King Manor Museum.
Kara’s Blog Post
Monsour Owolabi: Prisoner-Poet for the People in a Carceral State
Ally Sun Velez
Ally is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at SUNY Stony Brook, originally from South Florida. Her research centers Puerto Rican girls and their relationships with gang culture in New York City and Miami during the 1970s and 1980s. She received her Masters in history from the University of Georgia with a thesis that explored the double disenfranchisement that Puerto Rican people who are imprisoned on the island experience as a colonized body within a carceral space. She is a Turner fellow and received the Gardiner Grant for summer research.
Ally’s Blog Posts
Them/Us: The Multiple Faces of Carcerality in John Adam’s “Them”
How Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Have Reshaped Prison Reform
Anthony Gomez
Anthony is a current doctoral candidate of English Literature at Stony Brook University. He received both his BA and MA from New York University. His areas of focus, broadly stated, include the late-nineteenth century novel, film, advertising, and cultural studies. Prior to coming to Stony Brook, he completed a thesis reexamining poetics of memory and loss as hauntological in the works of Henry James and François Truffaut. He has also presented on topics around race and the American West, John Ford, and decolonial theory.
Anthony’s Blog Posts
What Does Justice Mean? Three Reflections on the Term
Prison-to-Deportation: A Reflection on Her-story in Black (Matters)
Sara Ahmedani
Sarah is a high school social studies teacher and a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Stony Brook University. She joined this project to further educate herself, as well as her students, on the injustices of mass incarceration and its impacts on families and communities.
Sara’s Blog Posts
Gabe Tennen
Gabe is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Stony Brook University, where his research focuses on politics and culture in the twentieth century urban U.S., with a specialty in New York City. His dissertation examines the 1969 Norman Mailer-Jimmy Breslin “51st State” campaign for New York City mayor and city council president.
Gabe’s Blog Post
“Hold On!” Chanell Burnette’s Essays and the Mass Incarceration of Mothers
Alliyah Dookie
Alliyah is an Africana Studies Master’s student who values people’s stories that shed light on the injustices in our society. Through this work, she is able to ensure that these voices are heard and recognized.
Alliyah’s Blog Posts
Michael Barone
Michael is a graduate student at Stony Brook University pursuing a Master’s degree in American History with a focus on race, class, labor, social movements, radical activism, and the state. Michael was drawn to this project out of a desire to help incarcerated authors share their stories and create an opportunity to foster meaningful change.
Michael’s Blog Post
Miranda Argyros
Miranda’s Blog Post
The Prison Panopticon: Foucault, the Carceral Eye, and the Incarcerated Author