Mia Florin Sefton is a Lecturer-in-Discipline in the English and Comparative Literature Department. She specializes in post-1900 American and British literature and culture, with research and teaching interests that span gender and sexuality studies, political economy, critical race theory, settler colonial and post-colonial studies, the history of the novel, carceral studies, and the politics of prison education.
Her first book project, The Disinherited: A 20th Century American Literary History, offers the first cultural history of the figure of “the disinherited” within post-1865 American fiction. Bringing together an eclectic archive of literary texts, political manifestos, political propaganda, economic doctrine, and legal documents, The Disinherited interrogates how, when and why this figure speaks to the descendants of the enslaved, the colonized, and the proletarianized. A literary history of a powerful idea, The Disinherited does not offer a singular account of dispossession. Instead, it recovers and foregrounds American literature’s undesirables—or what Jesse Jackson at the height of the Civil Rights Movement called "the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised"— to open an aperture onto the violently contested history of race, property, reproduction, kinship, rights, and reparations in the Americas.
Her second book project, The Classroom and the Cell: Prison, Education, and the University, stems from her teaching experience inside women's prisons with Columbia's Center for Justice-in-Education and it is motivated by one key question. What history of prisons and higher education emerges once we examine who is encouraged to teach in prison at different moments? Through addressing this question, The Classroom and the Cell aims to excavate the material and ideological points of connection between liberal penology and educational theory across the long twentieth century.
Mia had also published several articles at the intersection of contemporary culture, media, feminism, and reproductive politics. You can find her academic writing in Diacritics, Novel, Post45, Feminist Modernist Studies, Modernism/ Modernity Print Plus, The Modernist Review, Literature and Medicine, and Catalyst, among others. She is the recipient of the Miron Cristo-Loveanu Prize from Columbia University, the Jean Helen Macleod Prize from the University of Edinburgh, and her research has been supported by the Humanities Center Initiative, the Heyman Center, and the Thouron Award.
She currently teaches "Literature Humanities" in the Core Curriculum.
