Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:

The Emerson College Prison Initiative

The Bard Prison Initiative

How students apply to, enroll in, and attend college while in prison

Challenges faced by incarcerated students

Engaging effectively with incarcerated students


Our guest is: Dr. Mneesha Gellman, an Associate Professor of Political Science in the Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College, in Boston, MA, USA. her primary research interests include comparative democratization, cultural resilience, memory politics, and social movements in the Global South and the United States. She is the founder and Director of the Emerson Prison Initiative, which seeks to bring high quality liberal arts education to incarcerated students at Massachusetts Correctional Institute (MCI) at Concord, a men’s medium security prison. EPI follows the model of college-in-prison work led by the Bard Prison Initiative. Prior to joining the faculty at Emerson College, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg, Germany. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University, USA, and an MA in International Studies/Peace and Conflict Resolution from the University of Queensland, Australia.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender, and the co-founder of the Academic Life on NBN. She is the daughter of a public defender.
Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:


Education Behind the Wall: Why and How We Teach in Prison [Brandeis University Press, 2022], by Mneesha

The Alliance for Higher Education in Prison

The Prison Policy Initiative

This report from the ACLU

The Sentencing Project

Equal Justice Initiative

The Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI) Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI)


The Bard Prison Initiative Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison



Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic Minority Social Movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador by Dr. Mneesha Gellman


The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom by Stephen Brookfield

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