Hilary Binda

Hilary Binda has her PhD in English and is the Founding Director of the Tufts University Prison Initiative of Tisch College. She is Director of the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a Senior Lecturer in Civic Studies. Among her classes, The Literature of Confinement and Literatures of Justice combine Tufts undergraduates and incarcerated or formerly incarcerated students as co-learners. Her current research aims to support the development of educational equity as a form of racial and economic justice in partnership with decriminalization.
Founding Director, Tufts University Prison Initiative at Tisch College
Director, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Tufts University
Senior Lecturer, Visual and Critical Studies, Tufts University
Lecturer, Visual and Critical Studies, Tufts University
Director, SMFA Writing Program and Writing Studio, Tufts University
Assistant Professor in English (Culture, Text, and Language Area), Evergreen State College
High School English Teacher and Chair, School One, Providence, RI
Independent Video Producer, Meridian Productions, Providence, RI
Funded by a Tufts Collaborates seed grant, Binda is the Primary Investigator on a research study examining various impacts of the experience of college education on individuals who take college courses while doing time in prison. The study explores how formerly incarcerated people reflect on those college experiences. The results of this study are being used in the development of the in-prison college educational programming that is part of the Tufts University Prison Initiative at Tisch College (TUPIT).
In addition, Binda is working on a book manuscript, Image Conscious: Iconoclasm and the Reformation of Time in Early Modern English Literature, in which chapters on English poetry, drama, rhetoric, and science show that the drive that fueled a prejudice against images produced a "reformation of time," a shift in the mode of time’s apprehension that would become the basis of modern historical consciousness. No longer considered synchronic and uniform according to a medieval Augustinian paradigm, time would instead be understood as teleological and successive. This project in the history of ideas is thus one that demonstrates the ideological character of temporality and asks that we question its structuring assumptions about identity, sexuality, and normativity inherent therein. In one sense, this project sits squarely within a historicist tradition. It also, however, takes this tradition on as its very subject, collaborating with current efforts to historicize historicism.
“You’re almost in this place that doesn’t exist”: The Impact of College in Prison as Understood by Formerly Incarcerated Students from the Northeastern United States, Journal for Prison Education and Re-entry (JPER), Vol. 6, No. 2, 2020.