Mia Florin Sefton is a postdoctoral lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She works on post-1900 British and American literature and culture, with research and teaching interests that span gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, settler colonial and post-colonial studies, the history of the novel, and the politics of prison education.
Her first book project, The Disinherited: A 20th Century American Literary History, offers the first literary history of the idea 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, disenfranchisement, or loss. Instead, it recovers and foregrounds American literature’s undesirables—its banished, its bastardized, and its “black sheep”— to open an aperture onto the violently contested history of race, property, reproduction, kinship, rights, and reparations in the Americas.
Alongside teaching at Columbia, Mia has also taught courses in feminist theory and queer literature at Taconic Correctional Facility with Columbia’s Center for Justice in Education. Her second book project, provisionally titled The Classroom and the Cell: Prison, Education and the University, aims to interrogate the connection between educational theory and liberal penology by excavating the untold history of education programs in women’s prisons in the U.S. She is also currently at work on an article, titled “Sentimental Rubbish,” that examines representations of maternal attachment and mother-child bonding in accounts of America’s first prison nursery.
Mia currently teaches Literature Humanities in the Columbia Core Curriculum and her academic writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Diacritics, Modernism/Modernity, Post45, The Feminist Review, Catalyst, among others. Her research has been supported by the Humanities Center Initiative, the Heyman Center, and the Thouron Award.