Laura Ciolkowski
Senior Lecturer
Laura Ciolkowski is Senior Lecturer and co-founder of the UMass-Amherst Jail Education Initiative. She received her A.M. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Brown University and her B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude).
Ciolkowski’s research and teaching lie at the intersection of critical prison studies, gender-based violence, feminist pedagogy, and literary studies. She also teaches college courses in jails and prisons in Massachusetts and New York State. Ciolkowski is the recipient of a Public Service Endowment Grant for her work in prison education and humanities scholarship, a WFUM grant for her work in support of literary arts in jail, the recipient of a Civic Engagement and Service-Learning Faculty Fellowship, and a TIDE Faculty Fellowship in Teaching for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity. In 2022 she was invited to join the Bard Prison Initiative Residency for emerging leaders in the field of college-in-prison. She is also a certified “Inside-Out” prison education instructor and a member of the Massachusetts Prison Education Consortium (MPEC).
Ciolkowski’s work has been published in a range of journals, including: Humanities; Twentieth Century Literature; Studies in the Novel; Victorian Studies; Genders; Novel: A Forum on Fiction; Public Books; Victorian Studies; and Victorian Literature and Culture. Her “Rape Culture Syllabus,” published in Public Books, is widely shared and circulated by feminist scholars and activists across the country. Her book on rape culture, with Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, is under contract with Columbia University Press.
In addition to her scholarly research, Ciolkowski is a writer and book critic whose articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the International Herald Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
In 2021, Ciolkowski was awarded the Provost’s Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Teaching in recognition of her work in prison education. In 2023, she was awarded the College Outstanding Teacher Award.
Publications
“'Disappearing Acts' and Education as the Practice of Freedom: Feminist Pedagogy in Carceral Spaces” Transforming Together: Higher Education and the Carceral State (Routledge Press)
“Narrating Captivity, Imagining Justice: Gender, Monstrosity, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the Prison Classroom,” Sheila Smith McKoy and Patrick Elliot Alexander, editors, Teaching Literature in Prison (Modern Language Association Press)
"“What to Do with the Dangerous Few?”: Abolition-Feminism, Monstrosity and the Reimagination of Sexual Harm.”" Humanities 12.2 (2023).
Introduction, The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton (Knickerbocker Press, 2018)
"Representing Rape.” Public Books (October 2016)
Introduction and Editor, Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (Barnes and Noble Books, 2014)
Introduction, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (Barnes and Noble Books, 2012)
Introduction and Editor, Christmas Tales & Stories, Louisa May Alcott (Barnes and Noble Books, 2009)
Introduction, American Notes for General Circulation, Charles Dickens (Barnes and Noble Books, 2008)
Courses Recently Taught
- Critical Prison Studies
- Rape and Representation
- Imagining Justice
- Critical Feminist Pedagogy
- Teaching and Learning in Carceral Spaces
- Issues in Feminist Research
- Gender & Difference: Critical Analyses