Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
0009-0004-5852-9625
Dr Olivia Wright
Lecturer
About
Lecturer in history in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Olivia Wright joined Leeds Beckett University in January 2023 as a Lecturer in US History. Her research considers how different communities have historically used cultural tools and artistic expression to navigate and theorize the various manifestations of confinement-both physical sites, such as prisons, psychiatric facilities and reformatory schools, and the various racial, gendered and socioeconomic confinements that impact upon American society more broadly. She is currently working on her first book Sister Inside: Women's Prison Periodicals in the United States. It is the first study to collect, analyse, and theorise the history of women's prison periodicals and is grounded in an analysis of over fifty different publications and nearly 1,000 individual issues gathered through original archival research.
Olivia is a recipient of the Organization for Research on Women and Communication (ORWAC) Research Grant and the Feminist and Women's Studies Association Student Essay Prize. She has acted as postgraduate representative for the British Association of American Studies (BAAS) and is the current chair of the Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW). Olivia has published articles in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and the Journal of International Women's Studies. She received her PhD from the University of Nottingham, and has since held a Fellowship at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and worked as a Teaching Fellow in American History at the University of Leeds and the University of Aberdeen.
Research interests
Olivia's research examines the intersections between race, gender, incarceration and resistance in 20th and 21st century US history. She is interested in grassroot histories and marginalised voices and takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of history. In particular, she is interested in how print culture and literary practises are used within spaces of confinement as a way to educate, communicate and resist. Her first book project Sister Inside: Women's Prison Periodicals in the United States is the first interdisciplinary study to collect, analyse, and theorise the history of women's prison periodicals. By examining nearly a century of this carceral literary tradition, Sister Inside argues that the prison is a unique environment for creative production. It considers the ways in which this environment has affected the production of prison periodicals over the century: how censorship and outside involvement has influenced the style, production, readership, and content of the periodicals; and how serialization, reader involvement, and diverse authorship have shaped a distinctive and compelling sub-genre of American literature.
Olivia's new project 'Be good, girls!': Constructing American Girlhood in Reformatory School Newsletters is a book-length project that uncovers the hidden voices of incarcerated adolescents, analysing how representations of an idealised American girlhood were constructed and resisted within the pages of reformatory and industrial school newsletters throughout the twentieth century.
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Publications (2)
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‘Freedom in her Mind’: Women’s Prison Zines and Feminist Writing in the 1970s
2018
Journal of International Women's Studies Bridgewater State College
This paper examines the under-researched and undervalued area of American women’s prison zines. It discusses three publications created at the California Institute for Women, Frontera, during the 1970s, placing them in the wider contexts of prison reform and the women’s movement. Through close analysis, it demonstrates the influences of, and connections to, the feminist print culture at the time and how groups such as the Santa Cruz Women’s Prison Project enabled their publication and influenced their ideology. Examining women’s prison zines can contribute to conversations about women’s liberation by offering new perspectives on what I call ‘collective autobiography’, and giving voice to an obscured and forgotten community of women.
“Literary Vandals”: American Women’s Prison Zines as Collective Autobiography
17 February 2019
Women's Studies48(2):104-128 Informa UK Limited
Activities (5)
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The Society for the History of Women in the Americas Annual Conference
The Society for the History of Women in the Americas 2025 Annual Conference
The Society for the History of Women in the Americas' Annual Conference
The Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW)
Printing Prison Resistance: Women's Prison Zines in the United States
Current teaching
Olivia convenes a number of undergraduate and postgraduate modules including:
- Cultures of Confinement
- Prison Nation: Punishment, Power and Protest in the United States
- Migration and Cultural Encounters
- Digital History
