For the first seminar in our series, we were honoured to be joined by Michelle Daniel Jones, a fourth year doctoral student at NYU, who discussed her work as part of the Indiana Women’s Prison History project. This collaborative project sees incarcerated scholars at Indiana Women’s Prison (IWP), alongside fellow historians Elizabeth Nelson and Kelsey Kauffman, research the history of the first fifteen years of that institution, founded in 1873, which is forthcoming in a New Press volume.

As part of this project, researchers employ an innovative methodology, which Michelle described as “embodied observations” that centred participants’ personal experiences of carceral institutions when asking questions about and analysing the nineteenth-century realities of incarceration. This strategy meant approaching primary archival material from multiple viewpoints, giving rise to “meta-discussions” that traversed statistical data from prison registers and documentary evidence of daily life at IWP, in addition to lived experiences within that institution in the twenty-first century. Michelle and fellow scholars privileged incarcerated women’s voices, starting from the assumption of believing the extant testimony of nineteenth-century internees, and bearing witness to their experiences. In so doing, the project proves the methodological imperative of infusing the ethos of the #MeToo movement into historical practice, centring the experiences of criminalised women, who historically have been denied their truth.