Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

February 4, 2025

Abigail Arnold | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Geeking Out With…is a feature in which we talk to GSAS students about their passions. You can check out past installments here.

Jessi Brewer is a fifth-year PhD student in English. Her research examines how the nineteenth century literary imagination creates a space for an early version of prison abolition. She joined Geeking Out With… to talk about her research and its community aspects.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

What are you researching for your dissertation?

I’m looking at nascent moments of prison abolitionist thinking in the nineteenth century. The model of the penitentiary that we now know began in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so the Victorians were wrestling with emerging carceral logics. Some writers were thinking about how to resist this model. I look at Charles Dickens and William Morris’s writing and ask how these prolific writers are thinking about prisons in the mid to late nineteenth century. While “prison abolition” emerged as a term in the 1970s, I'm making the argument that there are traces of prison abolitionist thinking in early prison literature and that this might open up spaces for seeing Victorian writers as crucial to the history of mass incarceration. I’m looking at the prison abolitionist imagination as a literary imagination. How does literature open up spaces for imagining prison abolitionist futures? For thinking about our lives without prison?

While the nineteenth century produced a lot of prison nonfiction narratives (first-hand accounts, writings about prison life, etc.), I focus on what fiction opens up. Scholars talk about the abolitionist literary method and spaces for moments of freedom or liberation in the writing itself. I’m making the claim that fiction is something specific and generative for the movement.

Your dissertation has a community project aspect–can you tell us about that?

I’m doing a portfolio for my dissertation, which consists of several different portions. I’m writing some articles, and I also have a community engagement project. I’m working with a prison abolition organization in Roxbury, which I connected with through the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative (BEJI), to build a workbook for reimagining solutions to the problems of mass incarceration. It’s been really awesome because I’m working with a lot of young activists on a non-academic type of work, working to create new solutions to pressing social problems of mass incarceration that don’t involve prison logics. There’s so much that the university teaches you, but getting into a space where you have to wrestle with how it’s applied and how to leverage the skills you learn in literary studies is its own exciting journey.

How did you come to this area of research?

I’ve always been drawn to this topic. I come from the rural south, and there were people in my family and community who were in and out of prison. I took a prison literature class as an undergraduate, and it stuck with me. Later, when I worked at the University of Arkansas, I partnered with a local juvenile detention center and did some literacy workshops. This was the first time I saw how literature and literacy could create opportunities for people behind bars. Then, in my first semester at Brandeis, BEJI had a reading group, so I joined it, did a lot of reading, and got into their work. I ended up directing the Partakers Empowerment Program, BEJI’s thirteen-week reentry program for people coming out of prison, for a bit, developing curriculum and workshops for the program’s participants. I was working with BEJI while studying Victorian literature and not really putting them together, but the more I learned about carceral studies, the more I saw scholars noting the nineteenth century as a formative time and referencing specific writers like Dickens and Jeremy Bentham. Once I noticed that, I started seeing the prison everywhere in nineteenth-century literature, from Frankenstein early in the century to Dracula in the end! The prison’s presence in this literature became palpable to me, and I wanted to think about the impact of the literary imagination and bring it to the forefront.

How has your relationship to this topic changed over time?

I’ve had so many moments of deep wrestling with what I thought I knew and what I believe, not only about the prison system in general but about the relationship between the academy and community and the relationship between prison abolition and prison reform. Prison abolition seemed like an extreme political and philosophical stance to me at first, but I was converted to it over time! In studying these texts and all these great authors and scholars, I learned how important it is to have a political investment in imagination and to think about it as a rich space of activism, as well as how important it is to think about what you think you know. Then, once you go into the community, you have to wrestle with these questions in new ways. For example, what should we do instead of calling the police? Doing this research has changed how I approach my own neighborhood and interactions in the world. I’m still learning, but I’ve learned a lot about what it means to confront moral, political, and ideological hurdles in the real world and how to create deeper connection between my theory and praxis.

What people at Brandeis have helped you in exploring this area?

John Plotz is the best advisor I think I could have asked for. He’s been incredibly supportive through this process. He; Rosalind Kabrhel, chair of the Legal Studies Department; and Dave Sherman, of English, all co-founded BEJI, and I am really grateful the three of them brought it to Brandeis. It’s allowed me to experience working in community spaces and also given support to my theoretical research. For example, I did a research project with Rosalind where we looked at the eighth amendment across time and how changes in the culture have influenced perspectives on it. She’s been my thought partner in a lot of community engaged spaces. I was also a Teaching Assistant for Dave’s course “Literature in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” which was a great experience.

I taught a prison abolition course of my own in the spring of 2024, and thinking through these questions with my students really allowed me to sharpen my abolitionist pedagogy. I had to confront the challenge of teaching without punishing and surveilling students, and we collaborated a lot on how I would do that. For one class session, my teaching was observed, and a student was playing solitaire on her laptop but was the most engaged in the discussion of anyone. The faculty member who was observing noted this to me afterwards, and I had to decide not to police the student and think through an abolitionist approach to not surveilling students in the classroom. We had created community norms together, so there was no need for me to police her activity. It was an interesting tension. I had to think deeply about my pedagogical mission and reconsider how small things like this might reinforce institutionalized policing/surveillance in the classroom.

When you’re not working on your research or community work, what else do you like to do?

I’m a really big birder. I will bring my binoculars when I’m researching at the library or writing in the Mandel Center because the windows are so big! I got into birding in 2020, and since I’m from Arkansas, it’s been the most incredible way to explore New England. I visit lots of different Mass Audubon sites. I also got to lead a birdwatching session in Boston with BEJI’s reentry program and wrote an article about it! It’s been a really cool way to connect with people.

What advice do you have for other students exploring their passions?

I really believe that if you focus your work or research on something you’re passionate about, it doesn’t ever feel like work. In the spirit of thinking about imagination, don’t be afraid to do things other people haven’t done. The weirder something sounds, the more excited I get! It’s okay if something is weird, if it’s strange, if it doesn’t fit the traditional idea of what your passion should look like or the direction it should go. Don’t be afraid to imagine bigger things. Things that seem weird will probably be awesome in the end.