Gina Dent

Gina Dent (Ph.D., English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University) is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she received the Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award in the Humanities in 2019 and the Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity in 2007. She previously held positions at Princeton University and Columbia University and was Director of the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research at UCSC, as well as Principal Investigator for the UC Multicampus Research Group on Transnationalizing Justice. Currently, she is Faculty Fellow at the UCSC Institute of the Arts and Sciences, working as a consultant for the Barring Freedom exhibition (San José Museum of Art) and as co-convener of the Visualizing Abolition series of events, which includes the video collection Music for Abolition (https://visualizingabolition.ucsc.edu). She is the editor of Black Popular Culture and author of articles on race, feminism, popular culture, and visual art. Working at the hinges of the disciplines of literature, law, and anthropology, her current working projects grow out of her work as an advocate for prison abolition—Abolition. Feminism. Now. (co-authored with Angela Y. Davis, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie), Visualizing Abolition (co-edited with Rachel Nelson), and Prison as a Border, on popular culture and the conditions of knowledge. She has offered graduate courses and faculty seminars in critical race studies, critical theory and postcolonialism, and black feminisms in Brazil (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador and Universidade Federal Recôcavo da Bahia, Cachoeira), Colombia (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), and Sweden (Linköping University), as well as at the European Graduate School, and lectures widely on these and other subjects. She is a member of Scholars for Social Justice, the Portal Project, and works with organizations nationally and internationally, primarily on justice-related concerns.

Gina was a speaker at the 2023 Socialism Conference.