Inside-Out/Prison Education Works in Progress Lunch

José Vergara is an Assistant Professor of Russian on the Myra T. Cooley Lectureship. He teaches Russian language and all eras of Russian culture and specializes in prose of the long twentieth century with an emphasis on experimental texts. His first book, All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature (2021), examines the reception of Joyce’s fiction among Russian writers from the 1920s to the present, and he is now at work on a project exploring contemporary Russian prison literatures since 1991. Vergara began teaching in prisons in 2021 and is now offering the first Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program course at Bryn Mawr. He will speak about his experiences with different models of prison education, the transformational nature of this work, and the possibilities ahead.

Adam Williamson is an Assistant Professor of Biology. Williamson’s research focuses on understanding how immune cells called phagocytes protect the body by ingesting dead cells and neurotoxic debris and using these insights to build cellular eating machines for therapeutics. During his graduate work at UC Berkeley and fellowship at UC San Francisco, Williamson and a team of colleagues developed one of the first laboratory-based biology courses taught inside a U.S. prison. Williamson will discuss his past experiences teaching biology at San Quentin through Mount Tamalpais College (MTC, formerly known as the Prison University Project), describe his current role on the MTC faculty committee, and reflect on how his experiences working with incarcerated college students continues to inform his pedagogical approach.

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