Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Dr Olivia Wright
Lecturer
Olivia Wright joined Leeds Beckett University in January 2023 as a Lecturer in 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 Caged Sister: Women’s Prison Zines in the United States. It is the first study to collect, analyse, and theorize the history of women’s prison zines 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 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.
Current Teaching
Olivia teaches on a number of undergraduate modules including:
- Migration and Cultural Encounters
- Theory and Practise
She is module convenor to the Level 5 module Digital History and the MA module Cultures of Confinement.
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 Caged Sister: Women’s Prison Zines in the United States is the first interdisciplinary study to collect, analyse, and theorize the history of women’s prison zines. By examining nearly a century of this carceral literary tradition, Caged Sister 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 zines over the century: how censorship and outside involvement has influenced the style, production, readership, and content of the zines; 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.
Ask Me About
- Crime
- Culture
- Feminism
- Gender
- History
- Prison
- Race
- Writing
- Youth justice
