Dr Olivia Wright

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.