The Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination will co-sponsor a lunch seminar with the Princeton Prison Teaching Initiative (PTI), "Why We Need a More Global History of Incarceration, and Why We Currently Don’t Have One," with Matthew Larsen, Costen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows, on Tuesday, December 3, 2019, at 12:00 p.m., in 019 Bendheim Hall. Participants should bring their own lunch. To attend the session, RSVP online.

Prof. Larsen will discuss the reasons why we currently suffer from a parochial and undeveloped sense of the history of incarceration, and how this impacts us in the present, He will point out the ways that a more robust picture of how carceral practices and geographies would benefit us as we think about the past, present, and future of incarceration, discussing specific examples from the ancient and late antique Mediterranean contexts, with literary, documentary, and archaeological examples from his forthcoming book. 

Matthew Larsen is currently Lecturer in the Council of Humanities and Religion, and Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows. He is a cultural historian whose work focuses on the lived experiences of Jewish and Christian communities in classical and late antiquity. He came to Princeton from a teaching position at Yale University, where he also received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies in May 2017. Larsen is the author of the monograph Gospels before the Book (Oxford University Press, 2018), and his work has also been published in the Journal for the Study of Judaism, the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, the Journal of Early Christian Studies (forthcoming), Studies in Late Antiquity: A Journal (forthcoming), and various other venues. His research and teaching interests include ancient writing and reading cultures, carceral studies, ancient medicine, material culture, and approaching religions as constellations of embodied practices. He is currently working on writing a cultural history of early Christians and incarceration.

The LISD-PTI Brown Bag Series is a new initiative jointly launched by the Liechtenstein Institute and Princeton University's Prison Teaching Initiative meant to foster discussion of both prison pedagogy and the contemporary landscape of incarceration reform and abolition among the wider Princeton community. The Prison Teaching Initiative seeks to bridge Princeton University’s academic and service-driven missions by providing the highest quality post-secondary education to incarcerated students in New Jersey; offering Princeton University graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and staff innovative, evidence-based pedagogy training and the chance to diversify their teaching portfolios through intensive classroom experience; and fostering a robust campus dialogue on mass incarceration and its relationship to systemic inequalities in access to education. LISD currently supports two PTI graduate student fellowships.