English Department Doctoral Candidate Clinton Terrell Receives Prestigious UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Award for 2025-2026 Academic Year.

He previously received a Ford Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, and a Ford Dissertation Fellowship. Clinton’s dissertation committee includes Ben Olguin (Chair), Bernadette Andrea, Felice Blake, Joy James (Williams College), and Robert Weide (Cal State LA). As a CPFP he will be working with Principal Mentor Nigel Hatton at UC Merced and Co-Mentor Dylan Rodriguez at UC Riverside. His dissertation topic is titled, “Convict Nationalism: An Historical Analysis of Convict Identities, Race Formation, and the Poetics of Solidarity in Twenty-First Century Prisoner Life Writing.”

Terrell’s dissertation begins with an analysis of the language of solidarity in an archive of poetry, testimonials, short stories, essays, and artwork by organizers and participants of a two-month long hunger strike in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to demonstrate the articulation of a political and proto revolutionary “convict” identity in twenty-first century prisoner literary discourse. This contemporary iteration of the convict revolutionary enables Terrell to historicize the etymology and genealogy of the convict category to demonstrate the different ways in which the convict has been racialized in different historical periods, beginning with convict transportation from the British Isles and convict colonies in the sixteenth century, convict leasing and Jim Crow Laws in the aftermath of the Civil War, the criminalization of Native Americans and Mexican Nationals during and after the Plains Indian and Mexican American Wars, and up to the present day War on Drugs and War on Terror. Through a comparative analysis of various convict micronationalisms, and intersecting supra-racial syntheses, Terrell argues that incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, or “convicts,” have essentially become a unique multiracial and multigendered identity group with a distinct set of political needs and interests, vernacular knowledges, cultural aesthetics, and epistemological histories. A major contribution is his circumscribed yet grounded excavation of a revolutionary convict movement that is in dialogue with analogues across time and place.