About this Event

Join Professors Angela Hattery and Earl Smith to explore how the structure of solitary confinement dehumanizes prisoners and fosters gendered experiences in a highly sex-segregated and racialized space.

Hattery and Smith will discuss research that is based on hundreds of hours of observation in solitary confinement units as well as interviews with those who are incarcerated and those who work in solitary confinement. Their recently published book Way Down in the Hole: Race, Intimacy and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement details the full scope and findings of their research.

Angela Hattery is a professor of women and gender studies, and the co-director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Gender Based Violence at the University of Delaware. Earl Smith is a professor of women and gender studies at the University of Delaware and emeritus professor of American ethnic studies and sociology at Wake Forest University.

Hattery and Smith have each authored 12 books. In addition to Way Down in the Hole, they have co-authored several titles, including Policing Black Bodies: How Black Lives are Surveilled and How to Work for Change and Gender, Power and Violence: Responding to Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence in Society Today.

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This in-person event is part of our Scholar in the Library series. It is free and open to the public.

All event attendees must RSVP and will need to show ID upon arrival.