Jesse A. Goldberg (they/he/she) is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Humanities Institute at Penn State University and will be joining the English department at New Mexico Highlands University as Assistant Professor of American Literature in Fall 2022. They earned their PhD from Cornell University in 2018 where they taught as an instructor with the Cornell Prison Education Program. From 2018 to 2021 he worked as a contingent faculty member, first at Longwood University and then at Auburn University, before arriving at the Humanities Institute.

Jess is an Americanist literary scholar who situates his work within the triangulation of Black studies, critical prison studies, and queer and feminist theory. While at Penn State, they will be completing their first book project, Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice, which argues that Black Atlantic literatures of slavery articulate abolitionist theories of justice which exceed the ordering grammar of law’s progressive, teleological, and periodizing temporality. In addition to pursuing his own research projects, Jess is working to support the Restorative Justice Initiative’s prison education programs while in residence at Penn State, including teaching an internship course with RJI in Spring 2022.

Jess is co-editor of a special issue of GLQ titled “Queer Fire: Liberation & Abolition” which will be published in April 2022, and co-organizer of the 2022 Quarry Farm Symposium at Elmira College on “Abolition Studies” taking place in Fall 2022. Their scholarly writing is published or forthcoming in ASAP/Journal, College Literature, Public Culture, Women & Performance, Callaloo, MELUS, and CLA Journal, as well as the edited collections Teaching Literature and Writing in Prisons; The Routledge Guide to Alternative Futurisms; Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print; and Toni Morrison on Mothers and Motherhood.