Political scientist and sociologist Vesla Weaver is spending her career listening to and researching the voices of a sizable group of people whose experience of democracy, citizenship, and government is completely different from that of those not living under police surveillance.

“[W]hen you go through them one by one by one, they raise complex and genuine questions like ‘What is the meaning of punishment?’ and ‘What is freedom?'”  —Vesla Mae Weaver, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology, on the more than 3,300 first-person narratives of the American Prison Writing Archive, which describes life and […]

Describe your primary research or scholarship, and tell us what is most exciting about your current project.  My research centers on how the politics of time and memory function to enable and contest white supremacy, colonialism, and racial inequality. My new book, Segregated Time, explores how time is weaponized, how experiences of time (or temporality) […]

Vesla Weaver and her team launch The American Prison Writing Archive’s (APWA) new, fully searchable digital archive of writings by those impacted by the criminal legal system. The APWA is the largest body of prison witness ever amassed, including 3,300 nonfiction essays and poetry by incarcerated people from over 400 prisons and jails across the United States.  […]

Describe your primary scholarship or research, and tell us what is most exciting about your current work. I am currently a faculty fellow at Harvard University’s Warren Center for Studies in American History, where I am working on a book manuscript about the politics of monetary policy in the United States and Europe since the […]

Graduate student David Johnson has received a grant from Friends of the UW-Madison Libraries to cover research travel expenses. He plans to use it to spend substantial time in the papers of Paul S. Reinsch, who was an IR scholar at Madison and served as U.S. Minister to China under Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to […]

Professor Yuen Yuen Ang was a guest on the Ezra Klein show to discuss changes in how China is governed, and that understanding China as an “autocracy with democratic characteristics” is key to making sense of the trajectory. Listen to the episode or read the article on the New York Times.