Mallios Selected for Long Teaching Fellowship

Peter Mallios was selected as the AY 20-21 Long Teaching Fellow.

Christina Walter, Maud Casey, and John Long served on the Long Teaching Fellow Award Committee.

The Long Teaching Fellowship is made possible by John and Anne Long for their generous endowment allowing the English Department's faculty to develop their pedagogy and enhance the learning experience of our students.

Professor Mallios will use his time as the Long Teaching Fellow to develop an upper-division undergraduate course "Prison Studies and Literature," which will be developed in partnership with the Goucher Prison Education Partnership, a non-profit with which he has a working relationship. In addition to engaging administrators and faculty within and beyond English, Professor Mallios will reach out to groups like the Prison Fellowship, Justice Action Network, Storytelling for Change, and the Brennan Center for Justice.

The proposed organization for this course is creative and rigorous: it moves from providing students a historical and political background on incarceration, engaging works like Angela Davis’ The Prison-Industrial Complex, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, and Julia Sudbury’s Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex; to an examination of literary texts authored by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people (such as the collection Prison Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and excerpts from the writings of Thoreau, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Gapabandhu Das, and Antonio Gramsci); and the course culminates with a project in which students collaborate with students at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup Maryland.

The committee was especially impressed by the proposed collective class project to build a prison reform resource website, in which every student is challenged to contribute a meaningful component, and our hope is that this course will seed potential internships for students who would like to work with Professor Mallios, and other faculty members, teaching at area prisons.