-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

Trained as a specialist in twentieth century history and race, I am interested in examining the intersection of social, legal, and political history, African American and Chicano/a history, and the study of civil rights and social justice. I received my PhD in 2009 and my dissertation won the University of Maryland’s EB and Jean Smith award for best dissertation in political history. Previously, I was the public historian for the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, where I organized a large conference on Black Power. I am currently an assistant professor in the Department of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) where I am completing revisions on my book manuscript, Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Prisoners’ Rights Movements and the Construction of Carceral States (UNC, Chapel Hill). I am also presently co-editing an anthology entitled Sunbelt Prisons and Carceral States: New Histories of Immigration Detention/Deportation, Incarceration, and Resistance (UNC, Chapel Hill).

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

My forthcoming manuscript, Civil Rights on the Cell Block: The Prisoners’ Rights Movement and the Construction of Carceral States (UNC, Chapel Hill), addresses the contemporary crisis over criminal justice reform by posing three historical questions: 1) how did the United States come to have the world’s largest carceral state; 2) what have been the sources of resistance to America’s carceral state in the post-civil rights era (1965 to present); 3) what is the political relationship between the two?

My book will be the first study of the southern prisoners’ rights movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and the subsequent construction of what many historians now call the era of mass incarceration. This project is therefore a regional study of civil rights cases across the American South, but the book’s narrative is centered on the social movement that resulted in the landmark case Ruiz v. Estelle, which was a massive omnibus lawsuit that demanded that Texas outlaw the practice of having inmates act as openly armed guards. This southern trustee/guard system was a hierarchical racial regime that constituted a vicious sex trade in which convict guards were given the tacit approval from the prison administration to use their power to rape other inmates and engage in the buying and selling of inmate bodies as a sexual commodity that signified cultural standing and societal power. As a regional model, the Ruiz case inspired prisoners across the South to wage a historically mindful public campaign for visibility that sought to convince the courts and the wider public that southern prisoners suffered terrible abuses as twentieth century “slaves of the state.”

My manuscript shows that this inmate civil rights rebellion, while successfully ending the existing system, failed to make conditions in Texas prisons more humane. As a result, the new Texas prison regime — one that utilized paramilitary practices, promoted privatized prisons, endorsed massive prison building programs and tolerated gang-related warfare — established a new prison system that reaffirmed its law and order focus while sublimating the legal and human rights of prisons. This new “Sunbelt” carceral approach, I conclude, became exemplary of national prison trends.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

When I started this research in the early 2000s, there were relatively few historical studies of twentieth-century prisons and almost none of the prisoners’ rights movement. Despite the development of a “long civil rights movement” historiography, I found that the literature simply did not discuss the ways in which what we now call mass incarceration has turned the gains of the civil rights revolution into another age of racial disparity.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

First, historians need to explain how and why the vast expansion of state power as expressed in the massive prison buildup of the 1980s and 1990s occurred without much public debate. Conservative backlash theories have provided one such explanation, but locating the growth of the prison simply in reactionary “law and order” politics fails to adequately explain how it is that the places where the prisoners’ rights movement scored the most victories, namely the South and Sunbelt states, have come to dominate the major trends of the modern-day carceral state. The question of legal success for prisoners’ rights in the South, on the one hand, and yet nearly simultaneous massive prison build-up in Sunbelt states, on the other, is a major historical problem that my forthcoming book will address.

Second, the history of resistance to carceral states reveals that regional, state, and local histories are integral to the shape of mass incarceration. By demonstrating how a variety of prisoners’ rights movement resisted mass incarceration, I make the argument that regional histories and different state prison practices constructed not a single carceral state but a variety of carceral states across the American prison landscape.

When activists, policy makers, and reformers attempt to curb mass incarceration, they must seek redress not only at the federal level through national legislation but perhaps more importantly they must encounter the ways in which policing and mass incarceration are governed at the local and state level where the American state is indeed strong. One suggestion that my forthcoming book offer is that social justice movements against mass incarceration should continue to focus as much attention on changes in local and state government as the civil rights movement once did when it sought civil rights as a matter of national and federal intervention. To dismantle this encompassing thicket, we must utilize the spade of history to reveal just how deep we must cut to reach the roots of intertwining carceral states.

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-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I am a PhD candidate in Italian Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut, and a dissertation fellow at UCHI. I received my MA in Italian from UConn and my BA in Foreign Languages and Literatures, with a major in American Studies and a minor in German, from the University of Florence, Italy.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

I am currently writing my PhD dissertation entitled The Sale of Parga in 19^th Century Italian Imagery:1815-1856. In my dissertation, I examine the impact of an episode of the Greek War of Independence – the sale of the Greek city of Parga to the Ottoman Turks by the English government in 1819 – on the cultural work of Romantic Italian intellectuals and artists. I place the sale of Parga at the intersection of cultural, political, and historical discourses, and argue that this minor historical event is a prism to chart the major leading forces, tensions, and ideas that coalesced in the formation of Italian cultural nationalism. With this research project, I intend to extend the boundaries of the Italian national movement – also known as Risorgimento – to another national cause (the Greek one) and, by implication, to the larger European geo-political and geo-cultural space, thus shedding light on the transnational aspects of 19^th century Italian nationalist culture.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

The idea of this project is a shared effort between my advisor, Professor Norma Bouchard, and myself. We were discussing possible topics for my dissertation and I expressed my desire to work on 19^th century Italian literature. She suggested that I start by studying what has been defined as “the new historiography of the Risorgimento,” which has re-conceptualized the Italian national movement in transnational terms. The concept of transnationalism fascinated me, and I found particularly stimulating the idea of applying a new theoretical perspective to a topic that, at least in Italy, has been canonized as a foundational moment in the formation of the Italian nation and national identity. We identified in the cession of Parga a case study to analyze Risorgimento literature from this new perspective, thus contributing to the on-going research in this field.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

My hopes for this research are to reach scholars of the Risorgimento both in Europe and the US, who are engaged in questions of nations and national identity, Mediterranean studies, transnationalism, and their intersection with personal and collective emotional concerns. The Italian Risorgimento will continue to stimulate a remarkable critical dialogue among scholars, for its peculiar intersection of a number of fields of research relevant to the humanities, such as history, politics, literature, visual arts, social sciences, ethics, and religion. This research project, in particular, due to its interdisciplinary nature that calls forth the core of the humanities and discusses some universal principles, such as nationality, freedom, and political hospitality, could represent a case study to further investigate the development of a Mediterranean identity in the modern era. This issue is particularly relevant to contemporary Italy – and Europe – due to the massive waves of migrants reaching the shores of Italy every day. As a consequence of this phenomenon, contemporary Italy is struggling to redefine and rethink that concept of Italianness created by the intellectuals who promoted the national movement at the beginning of the 19th century.