2020 Graduate Achievement Award recipient
Serraes’ work with UM’s Prison-to-College Pipeline Program serving incarcerated students shaped her research and future plans. She received a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for her study of African American women’s literature in response to mass incarceration. Serraes shows how these writers revealed how long histories of gendered racial oppression in institutions such as slavery and segregation has resonances in the prison system today.
“I believe literature has the ability to communicate how social problems affect people in multifaceted ways that other disciplines cannot. A single novel or poem can span long historical periods, depict the complexity of relationships, or give language to experiences that might otherwise be considered indescribable.”