Department of English

Sarina’s research interests lie at the intersection of 20th- and 21st-century prison literature and performance, abolitionist social movements, and Black Studies, with special interest in emerging theorizations of relationality, sociality, and care. Her research questions how socio-aesthetic and formal practices have shifted, from the beginning of the age of mass incarceration to now, in response to expansions of a racialized carceral landscape, intensifications of organized abandonment, and fortifications of the prison-industrial complex. Her research further asks how literary forms might lend themselves to relationality—to being materially, affectively, or sonically in common, in lieu of racial capitalism’s increasing atomization and reliance on detention. This is to say, she is interested in the form things take in relation to the conditions and constraints of their production, and how these modes might offer us alternate ways of being/reading/knowing/connecting which refuse domination.