Jackie Wang

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Jackie Wang is a black studies scholar, poet, multimedia artist, and PhD candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University who specializes in race and the political economy of prisons and police in the United States. She recently published a book, titled Carceral Capitalism (MIT Press, 2018), on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state.

As a Radcliffe fellow, Wang is completing her dissertation, tentatively titled “The Carceral Laboratory.” In the work, she uses archival methods to examine how bail reformers’ calls to reform the criminal legal system catalyzed experimentation in the realm of criminal procedure and led to the development of pretrial risk assessment.

Wang is the recipient of fellowships from the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Film Study Center, and the Schlesinger Library, where she conducted research on the life and legacy of Angela Davis. In 2020, she will be an assistant professor of culture and media at the New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts.