A Zoom seminar series that explored the interlocking roles of gender, race, and sexuality in the carceral histories of the 20th century United States. Convened by Grace Watkins, Elizabeth Evens, and Liz Barnes. Information about all presenters below.

Michelle Daniel (Jones) is a fourth-year doctoral student in the American Studies program at New York University.  She is interested in excavating the collateral consequences of criminal convictions for people and families directly impacted by mass incarceration.  Michelle’s advocacy extends beyond the classroom through collaborations and opportunities to speak truth to power. While incarcerated, she presented legislative testimony on a reentry alternative she created that was approved by the Indiana State Interim Committee on the Criminal Code. As a subject matter expert, she serves in the development and operation of taskforces, think tanks and initiatives to reduce harm and end mass incarceration and has joined Second Chance Educational Alliance as a Senior Research Consultant, the boards of Worth Rises and Correctional Association of New York and advisory boards of the Jamii Sisterhood, The Education Trust, A Touch of Light, Urban Institute and ITHAKA's Higher Ed in Prison Project.

She is a founding member and board president of Constructing Our Future, a reentry and housing organization for women created by incarcerated women in Indiana and a 2017-18 Beyond the Bars fellow, a 2017-18 Research Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and a 2018-19 Ford Foundation Bearing Witness Fellow with Art for Justice, 2019 SOZE Right of Return Fellow, 2019 Code for America Fellow and 2019-2020 Mural Arts Rendering Justice Fellow.  Michelle is currently under contract with The New Press to publish the history of Indiana’s carceral institutions for women with fellow incarcerated and formerly incarcerated scholars.  

As an artist, further, Michelle is interested in finding ways to funnel her research pursuits into theater, dance and photography.  Her co-authored original play, “The Duchess of Stringtown” was produced in December 2017 in Indianapolis and New York City and her artist installation about stigma, “Point of Triangulation,” ran September 26 – October 1, 2019, at NYU Gallatin Gallery in New York, March 6-8, 2020 at the Beyond the Bars Conference at Columbia University, and with new participants November 14, 2020 – January 1, 2021 at the African American Museum in Philadelphia with a Mural Arts of Philadelphia mural opening October 2021.

Romarilyn Ralston, is Program Director of Project Rebound at California State University Fullerton and also serves as the Co-chair of the CSU Project Rebound Policy and Advocacy Committee.  Romarilyn is a black feminist prison abolitionist scholar working to interrupt criminalization at the intersections of race, gender, and education.

Romarilyn earned a Master in Arts degree in Liberal Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and Bachelor in Arts degree in Gender & Feminist Studies at Pitzer College. She has received several honors and awards for her work over the years including being named Pitzer College’s 2020 Distinguished Alumni Honoree, California Senator Ling Ling Chang’s 2020 Woman of Distinction Social Justice Champion awardee, and National Council of 100 Black Women (Orange County Chapter), 2018 Civil Rights and Advocacy recipient. Romarilyn is a 2017-2018 Women's Foundation of California Women’s Policy Institute alumnus where she served as fellow and an integral member of the criminal justice reform team to pass several pieces of legislation in law.  In addition, Romarilyn has completed fellowships with Just Leadership USA, Leading with Conviction 2018, CORO in Public Affairs, 2015, and Napier Initiative for Justice and Peace, 2014.

As a statewide organizer and advocate with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, she advocates, monitors, and challenges the abusive conditions inside California women’s prisons fighting for the release of women, gender non-conforming, and trans people.

Claire E. Aubin is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Divinity. Her PhD dissertation, entitled ‘From Treblinka to Trenton: Holocaust Perpetrators as Immigrants to the United States,’ focuses on the comparative individual agency of Holocaust perpetrators throughout their experiences of post-war US immigration. Claire’s academic work frequently explores concepts of perpetration, collaboration, community, and justice, as well as public perceptions of these issues. She is also the co-founder of the Emotionally Demanding Histories Group, an initiative to explore new approaches to researching traumatic and distressing historical subjects. 

Dr Ruth Lawlor is Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge. She received her PhD from Cambridge in 2019 and has previously been a Visiting Fellow at Boston University (2017) and Yale University (2018-2019). Her doctoral dissertation, “American Soldiers and the Politics of Rape in World War II Europe”, was awarded an honourable mention in the Oxford University Press USA Dissertation Prize by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (2020) and the Sara Norton Senior Prize by the University of Cambridge (2021). Her work has appeared, or will soon appear, in Diplomatic History, Modern American History, Journal of Military History, and Perspectives, the magazine of the American Historical Association.

Dr Althea Legal-Miller is a Senior Lecturer in American History and Culture at Canterbury Christ Church University. She received her BA in American Studies with Year Abroad (University of California, Berkeley), MA in Contemporary Cinema Cultures and PhD in American Studies, all from King’s College London. Dr Legal-Miller’s recent publications include chapters in Reclaiming the Great World House: The Global Vision of Martin Luther King Jr (University of Georgia Press, 2019) and the forthcoming Developments in American Politics 9 (Palgrave), and she has provided expert commentary for BBC The One Show, Channel 5, BBC Radio London and BBC Radio 3.

Dr Scott De Orio (pronouns: he/him/his) is a historian whose research focuses on LGBTQ history and the history of the carceral state. He was a 2018–20 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN), and he received his Ph.D. in History and Women's Studies from the University of Michigan in 2017. His first book project is titled Bad Queers: How Coalitions Transformed the Governance of Gay Sex and Gender Nonconformity (under review, University of Chicago Press). It examines the creation of an expansive system of social and legal control over forms of gay sex and gender-nonconforming expression in the US after World War II. Scott’s second book project is a transatlantic study of the governance of child sexuality from the Enlightenment to the present. His writing has or will appear in the edited anthology The War on Sex (Duke, 2017), the Journal of the History of Sexuality and Law & Social Inquiry.

Thanks to the Rothermere American Institute for generously supporting this series.