OPEEP Program Coordinator Nicole Edgerton met with three newly hired faculty earlier this year to discuss their decision-making process in coming to OSU, shared backgrounds in prison education, and what excites them about working with OPEEP. Read on to learn more about each scholar and their passion for prison education at OSU and beyond!
DeAnza Cook joined the Department of History in Autumn 2023 as a Provost postdoctoral fellow and incoming assistant professor of contemporary African American History and Black Leadership. Originally from small-town Virginia, Cook graduated with a BA in History from the University of Virginia in 2017, then earned a MA and PhD in History from Harvard University in 2019 and 2023 respectively. Her dissertation, Soul Patrols: Race, Representation, and the Limits of Police Reform in America, 1962-2022, examined the evolution of police reform, police-community partnerships, and experimental crime control in Boston at the dawn of the 21st century. She’s currently writing her first book, which builds upon her doctoral research to continue exploring histories of police reform, police science, and police-community relations in the Boston area and beyond in the 21st century.
Dr. Cook’s passion for prison education began in graduate school while teaching a Black history course inside a Massachusetts state prison. With so many students actively involved in community organizations in addition to their coursework, she felt “tremendously inspired by the phenomenal leadership, dedication, and organization that was happening inside the prison.” When she later entered the job market, Cook made a point of asking each employer about their institution’s investment and involvement in prison education, which is how she first discovered OPEEP. She felt excited about the project right away, recognizing that “OPEEP sets OSU apart from most other universities that otherwise ignore or refuse to engage with incarcerated students, which constitute an enormous population of college students that are being underserved in this country.”
OPEEP in particular played a major role in Cook coming to OSU, as her decision was heavily dependent on the people she met and the groundwork that had already been laid for prison education. “OPEEP’s mission to build prison-to-college pathways through education, advocacy, and outreach already resonated with what I was doing. I wanted, above all, to be part of a university community that had a demonstrated and sustained commitment to the work of integrating currently and formerly incarcerated folks into higher education. To me, that is a dream come true. That is 21st century de-segregation of higher education. Being a part of a program within a university that has those shared values and vision for me felt like a match made in heaven.”
For Cook, “being part of a prison education space that is consciously Black feminist, intersectional, LGBTQ+ inclusive, and rooted in social justice pedagogies is essential.” The fact that OPEEP is led by women who are vocally and visibly engaged in this work within the university community was another green flag for Cook, who feels excited to “continue developing more courses that speak to these values and expand upon liberatory visions of education, because we need those courses and more classes so more people can be a part of this experience.”
Aside from developing new courses, Dr. Cook also enjoys participating in OPEEP’s learning communities, which have been “an extremely valuable first step for me to connect and get to know OSU faculty, students, and incarcerated community members.” She describes learning community gatherings at the Ohio Reformatory for Women and Southeastern Correctional Institution as “inspiring, informal, lowkey, accessible to undergraduates, grads, staff, and faculty,” and great opportunities to “meaningfully interact and get to know one another.” For Cook, being able to explore these interests and connections in “collaborative, social justice-oriented ways is another extra special space OPEEP offers, and I’d encourage anyone interested to learn more about what makes OPEEP special and to really dig in and engage with those learning communities as an entry point.”
V.N. Trinh joined The Ohio State University in Autumn 2023 as a postdoctoral scholar and incoming assistant professor of African American and African Studies. Originally from the Bay Area, he received his PhD in History and two other graduate degrees from Yale, and his undergraduate degree in History from the University of California, Riverside. Before moving to Columbus, Trinh taught at Earlham College, Lafayette College, Southern Connecticut State University, and Yale University.
Trinh has “always been interested in the possibility of multiracial coalition building,” and in particular, the response of Black and Asian American radicals to the rise of law-and-order policing and crisis of imperialism in 20th century America. Having witnessed firsthand many of the current crises faced by public education, including increased presence of police departments on college campuses, Trinh has been invested in these struggles since the early stages of his intellectual growth. He joined the Yale prison education initiative in 2014 and found he thoroughly enjoyed working with incarcerated students, some of whom he remains in contact with to this day. Reflecting on this experience, Trinh admitted one of his greatest fears leaving graduate school was that it could be his last time teaching in a prison. He felt particularly excited upon receiving the offer to teach at OSU, as he knew the university had recently launched its own prison education program with similar goals and objectives to the Yale initiative. “Even in this limited job market, I was always hoping and waiting for a job that would take prison education seriously. It had to be somewhere in the campus agenda.”
Trinh was also interested in teaching at OSU as a public college, believing strongly in the power of education and public higher education specifically. For Trinh, the existence of OPEEP “helps the university fulfill its mission of educating the entire Ohio public, and not just the students who take classes on campus.” Coming to Ohio State, he “knew the program had a stated commitment to an egalitarian model of learning and had enacted policies in order to make that egalitarian model closer to reality,” which mattered deeply to him and “was something that was really exciting for me as someone who’s also about to teach for OPEEP.”
Speaking to the unique nature of prison education and student makeup in OPEEP classes, Trinh is also excited to teach older, non-traditional students alongside students from campus who “made the conscious decision to take this specific class,” explaining that “the greater level of diversity in the classroom actually creates an environment where everybody is more motivated and nobody slacks off.” Not only the students benefit from greater diversity and building upon each other’s motivation, though; as Trinh explains, “teaching in prisons has actually made me a much better teacher.” Although he completed his PhD in history, Trinh found himself teaching remedial calculus to students during his time with the Yale prison education initiative out of necessity, which showed him “there’s no more hiding” when it comes to teaching in prisons. For Trinh, teaching inside “stripped away the veneers of expertise and academic nonsense,” forcing him to think critically about how and what he teaches and how he can continue to improve.
Grace Li joined The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law in Autumn 2023 as a Fellow in Law and incoming assistant professor. She is part of Ohio State’s Race, Inclusion and Social Equity (RAISE) cohort, which brings tenure-track faculty members to the university whose research addresses racial and social issues. Professor Li researches incarceration and the state’s responses to crime. Some of her current work explores associative life in prisons.
She began volunteering inside prisons as an academic tutor during undergraduate at Princeton, which led her to realize both her passion for teaching and her desire to learn more about the U.S. system of incarceration. While attending NYU for law school, Li designed and taught a legal research class for incarcerated women in NY state, which inspired her to rethink the role of law schools and law libraries in supporting the work of incarcerated people. Ultimately, she dreams of a world in which “every law school and law library around the country [is] supporting prisons in their communities.”
Li felt excited about coming to OSU in large part due to the existence of OPEEP. Having volunteered with the Petey Green Program as an undergraduate then continuing to work at the nonprofit before attending law school, she felt well-aware of the “incredible hard work and ingenuity and savviness [it takes] to set up and maintain strong in-prison education programs.” Upon discovering OPEEP, she thought it was “just a miracle, because that meant I could come in and benefit from the amazing work of the people who came before me and continue building those relationships with prison administrators and the university.” Li was not only excited by the prospect of a university with a pre-established prison education program, but also the community which comes with it, knowing she would have to find community of her own at schools without any pre-existing programming.
Another point of excitement for Li was the “explicit political orientation coming from the leaders of OPEEP,” which she feels runs in contrast to other prison education programs which aim to indoctrinate, rather than truly educate. Li appreciates programming that takes into consideration “the sort of radical, collective work and associations and groups and other kinds of collective activity that was already being done by incarcerated people themselves, like peer education, self-study, newspapers, and zines that people were already creating.” In her opinion, having an explicitly Black feminist, decolonial, abolitionist political orientation helps to work against harmful narratives about prison education programs and helps us think more critically about “what it means for people on the outside to go into prisons maybe for the first time, whether it’s future students, community members, or other members of the public.”
Professor Li looks forward to building relationships with students and community members in future OPEEP classes. Acknowledging that “relationship-building was what gave me meaning and led me to want to continue working with people inside,” she's excited to facilitate those relationships for students in her future classes.
