About

Dr. Jesse A. Goldberg completed his PhD in African American literature at Cornell University in 2018, where he taught classes for the Department of English and the Program in American Studies as well as the Cornell Prison Education Program, before joining the faculty at Longwood University from 2018 to 2020. A lifelong teacher, Dr. Goldberg has thus taught in a private research university, at a public liberal arts college, and inside medium- and maximum-security state prisons.

As a Visiting Research Fellow at Auburn, Dr. Goldberg is currently working on a book project titled Abolition Time: Reading Queer Justice in Slavery’s Afterlife. Coming out of his dissertation work, the project uses the 1781 Zong Massacre as a grounding motif to examine literary and performative texts of the Black Atlantic that engage questions of law, justice, and time. Abolition Time argues that in addition to registering the memory of slavery as exceeding attempts at historical repression, a number of Black Atlantic texts formulate theories of justice which put pressure on the law’s excessive violence through meditating on all that exceeds the law’s reach, resulting in literary and performative articulations of an “excessive present” wherein the past and future fold into a single “now” that unfolds into an ethical imperative for abolitionist politics. Abolition time, then, signals the urgency of a political demand which exceeds historical periodization. The project grounds the concept of abolition time in the methodology of close reading to offer an extended meditation on the question, “What does an abolitionist reading look like, and what might it do?” By doing so, the book will offer a model for abolitionist reading practices as a contribution both to the discipline of literary studies and the interdisciplinary project of black studies and critical prison studies more broadly.

Dr. Goldberg’s scholarly writing appears or is forthcoming in the journals Women & Performance, Public Culture, Callaloo, MELUS, and CLA Journal, as well as the edited volumes Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print, Teaching Literature and Writing in Prisons, The Routledge Guide to Alternative Futurisms, and Toni Morrison on Mothers and Motherhood. He has also contributed public, online review essays to ASAP/J and The Rambler Review and shorter essays to The Platform and The Feminist Wire. His ASAP/J review essay, alongside his recent experience teaching courses on Afrofuturism, point towards the next direction of his research. Dr. Goldberg seeks to join a number of contemporary thinkers to bring abolitionist literary studies into the generative convergences of black studies and the environmental humanities at key questions of the Human, climate catastrophe as it indexes afterlives of slavery and colonization, and modes of relation on a rapidly warming planet. This new research program takes more formal shape in an essay on N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy that is currently under review, and which he hopes may be a seed for a second book project.

In addition to working on his own book project and a number of essays, Dr. Goldberg is currently co-editing a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies on the intersections of and gaps between prison abolition and queer liberation in both theory and practice. The issue is slated for publication in March 2022.