Nolan Bennett
Professor
Fields
- American Political Thought
- Prisons and Punishment
- Law and Literature
Contact Information
- E-mail: nbennett@calpoly.edu
About Nolan Bennett
Education
Ph.D., Government, Cornell University (2015)
B.A., Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles (2008)
Research Interests
Prof. Nolan Bennett is a political theorist specializing in American Political Thought, Law, and Literature. His research recovers and reconstructs the political and legal thinking of incarcerated activists throughout history and the contemporary United States. With an interdiciplinary approach, Nolan combines tectual analysis of opoular and archival writings with historical analysis of legal and institutional developments in American penal policy.
He is currently writing a book on George Jackson and has recently worked on activist Jean Genet, anarchist Alexander Berkman, and life sentences. His first book The Claims of Experience: Autobiography and American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2019) provides a new theory for what makes autobiography political throughout the history of the United States and today.
Before Cal Poly, Nolan taught at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Georgetown University, and Duke University. Nolan has a deep passion for teaching in prisons and grew up in Oakland. Learn more about his work at his personal website.
Classes
Selected Publications
- “The Ambivalence of Alexander Berkman’s Anti-Prison Anarchism.” American Political Science Review (September 28, 2023).
- “George Jackson’s Perfect Disorder.” New Political Science 44:1 (2022).
- “‘The State was Patiently Waiting for Me to Die’: Life without the Possibility of Parole as Punishment.” Political Theory 49:2 (2021).
- “Alabama is US: Concealed Fees in Jails and Prisons.” UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review 4:1 (2020) (with Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Jacob Swanson).
- The Claims of Experience: Autobiography and American Democracy. Oxford University Press (2019).
- “Unwillingness and Imagination in Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave.” The Review of Politics 81:2 (2019).
- “Emma Goldman and the Autobiography of the People.” American Political Thought 6:1 (2017).
- “To Narrate and Denounce Wrongs: Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Personal Narrative.” Political Theory 44:2 (2016).