Doran Larson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3629573 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Doran Larson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Doran |
| FAMILY NAME | Larson |
| SIGNATURE | LARSON D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hamilton College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 9 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Cambridge Companion to American Prison Writing and Mass Incarceration
This book tells the story of mass Incarceration in America through the writers who experienced it first-hand. It begins at mid-century with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, whose insights about racism and the criminal justice system warned of what was to come. It takes off in the 1960s and 1970s with revolutionary writers like George Jackson, Assata Shakur, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, seeking liberation not just from prison but the oppressive s…
Inside Knowledge
A powerful critique of mass incarceration by the people who have experienced it Inside Knowledge is the first book to examine the American prison system through the eyes of those who are trapped within it. Drawing from the writings collected in the American Prison Writing Archive, Doran Larson deftly illustrates how mass incarceration does less to contain any harm perpetrated by convicted people than to spread and perpetuate harm among their fami…
Prison Writer as Witness
Drawing from a largest and first fully-searchable digital archive of non-fiction essays by incarcerated people writing about their experience inside US prisons and jail, the article proposes that there exists a broad, well established, but underappreciated mid-range manner of reading that stands between traditional close reading and computer-aided distant reading of first-person witness testimony. This mid-range or “cellular” reading method atten…
Writing Resistance, Writing the Self
Based in a digital archive of first-person witness by people currently incarcerated in the United States (U.S.), this paper discusses witness texts that document and grieve the experience of alienation of self-identity, fight that alienation, and that together map both the degradation of human dignity at the center of current U.S. penality and how it can be resisted in restoring sociality with other incarcerated people. Writing from inside often …
Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration
Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration Doran Larson (bio) The American Prison Writing Archive http://www.dhinitiative.org/projects/apwa The American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) is an open-source and fully searchable digital platform that makes first-person nonfiction essays by incarcerated people, as well as by prison workers and volunteers, available to a global public, to policymakers, to families of incarcerated people, and to scholars and…
Abolition From Within
Toward a Prison Poetics
The essay argues that prison writing bears not only a common subject but recurrent, formal traits, and that these generic traits emerge directly from prison writing's material links to the strategies of power exercised within prisons in general and to the particular conditions of each writer's incarceration. By analyzing tropic veins common to all prison texts, we discover a generically coherent body of literature as germane to discussions of jus…
Politics by Other Means
Research Article| September 01 2010 Politics by Other Means: Legal Poetics, Prison Narrative Doran Larson Doran Larson Hamilton College [email protected] Doran Larson is professor of English and creative writing at Hamilton College. His essays on prison writing, prison teaching, and related issues have appeared or are forthcoming in College Literature, Radical Teacher, The Minnesota Review, Salmagundi, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He…
Machine as Messiah
On September 22, 1676, a Dr. Brakenbury conducted the first human dissection by Europeans in North America. Samuel Sewell's diary records that a Mr. Hooper, taking the [heart] in his hand, affirmed it to be the stomack.' As James Schramer and Timothy Sweet have remarked, this misrepresentation of the internal organs of a geopolitical enemy was necessary to that ideological apparatus whereby the Puritan community gained its sense of social cohesio…
Machine as Messiah
On September 22, 1676, a Dr. Brakenbury conducted the first human dissection by Europeans in North America. Samuel Sewell's diary records that a Mr. Hooper, taking the [heart] in his hand, affirmed it to be the stomack.' As James Schramer and Timothy Sweet have remarked, this misrepresentation of the internal organs of a geopolitical enemy was necessary to that ideological apparatus whereby the Puritan community gained its sense of social cohesio…
Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration
Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration Doran Larson (bio) The American Prison Writing Archive http://www.dhinitiative.org/projects/apwa The American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) is an open-source and fully searchable digital platform that makes first-person nonfiction essays by incarcerated people, as well as by prison workers and volunteers, available to a global public, to policymakers, to families of incarcerated people, and to scholars and…
Machine as Messiah
On September 22, 1676, a Dr. Brakenbury conducted the first human dissection by Europeans in North America. Samuel Sewell's diary records that a Mr. Hooper, taking the [heart] in his hand, affirmed it to be the stomack.' As James Schramer and Timothy Sweet have remarked, this misrepresentation of the internal organs of a geopolitical enemy was necessary to that ideological apparatus whereby the Puritan community gained its sense of social cohesio…
Toward a Prison Poetics
The essay argues that prison writing bears not only a common subject but recurrent, formal traits, and that these generic traits emerge directly from prison writing's material links to the strategies of power exercised within prisons in general and to the particular conditions of each writer's incarceration. By analyzing tropic veins common to all prison texts, we discover a generically coherent body of literature as germane to discussions of jus…
Politics by Other Means
Research Article| September 01 2010 Politics by Other Means: Legal Poetics, Prison Narrative Doran Larson Doran Larson Hamilton College [email protected] Doran Larson is professor of English and creative writing at Hamilton College. His essays on prison writing, prison teaching, and related issues have appeared or are forthcoming in College Literature, Radical Teacher, The Minnesota Review, Salmagundi, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He…
Abolition From Within
Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration
Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration Doran Larson (bio) The American Prison Writing Archive http://www.dhinitiative.org/projects/apwa The American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) is an open-source and fully searchable digital platform that makes first-person nonfiction essays by incarcerated people, as well as by prison workers and volunteers, available to a global public, to policymakers, to families of incarcerated people, and to scholars and…
Writing Resistance, Writing the Self
Based in a digital archive of first-person witness by people currently incarcerated in the United States (U.S.), this paper discusses witness texts that document and grieve the experience of alienation of self-identity, fight that alienation, and that together map both the degradation of human dignity at the center of current U.S. penality and how it can be resisted in restoring sociality with other incarcerated people. Writing from inside often …
Prison Writer as Witness
Drawing from a largest and first fully-searchable digital archive of non-fiction essays by incarcerated people writing about their experience inside US prisons and jail, the article proposes that there exists a broad, well established, but underappreciated mid-range manner of reading that stands between traditional close reading and computer-aided distant reading of first-person witness testimony. This mid-range or “cellular” reading method atten…
Inside Knowledge
A powerful critique of mass incarceration by the people who have experienced it Inside Knowledge is the first book to examine the American prison system through the eyes of those who are trapped within it. Drawing from the writings collected in the American Prison Writing Archive, Doran Larson deftly illustrates how mass incarceration does less to contain any harm perpetrated by convicted people than to spread and perpetuate harm among their fami…
The Cambridge Companion to American Prison Writing and Mass Incarceration
This book tells the story of mass Incarceration in America through the writers who experienced it first-hand. It begins at mid-century with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, whose insights about racism and the criminal justice system warned of what was to come. It takes off in the 1960s and 1970s with revolutionary writers like George Jackson, Assata Shakur, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, seeking liberation not just from prison but the oppressive s…
Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (6 works) · Prison (6 works) · Political science (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Art (4 works) · Criminology (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Witness (3 works) · Aesthetics (2 works)