Description:

CALEB SMITH: English, Yale University

"The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict: Race, Penal Servitude, and Prison Writing before Emancipation"

Brief description: This lecture introduces Austin Reed's recently discovered prison memoir, "The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict" (1858). Born to a free black family in Rochester, Reed spent most of his early life confined to New York's House of Refuge, America's first juvenile reformatory, and Auburn State Prison, the birthplace of industrial penal servitude. His book documents the rise of large-scale imprisonment in the years before the Civil War and invents literary strategies for enduring and refashioning the experience of captivity.

Bio: Caleb Smith is professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Prison and the American Imagination (2009) and The Oracle and the Curse (2013) and the editor of Austin Reed's The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict (2016).

Reception to follow.