Welcoming Distinguished Faculty

Across BPI Campuses in Prison

Francine Prose & Fred Moten —

Francine Prose and Fred Moten are co-teaching the BA seminar titled Literary Responses to Totalitarianism at Eastern Correctional Facility, which will focus on narrative structure and literary style as well as historical and political content.

The recipient of numerous grants and honors, Francine Prose is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College, and was formerly president of PEN American Center.

Fred Moten is an American cultural theorist, poet, and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and performance studies. Moten was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020 and is often recognized as one of the most important contemporary American poets.

Congressman Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) —

From the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to the Black Panther Party, and from there to the halls of the United States Congress, former Congressman Bobby Rush has been a tribune of U.S. Black political thought and action for decades. 

A Distinguished Faculty Fellow at BPI, Rush leads students through an exploration of the ideas and experiences that led him and others of his generation to choose lives of radical political thought and action in the course Rural Roots and City Branches: Themes in Twentieth-Century Black Political Thought, co-taught by BPI Associate Dean, Delia Mellis.

Rush will also teach a course with BA Program Faculty Advisor Andrés Pletch titled The Ethics of Malcolm X, which examines the life and legacy of Malcolm X, with a focus on the developing moral principles undergirding his work as a minister, social critic, and political leader. 

Philip Gourevitch —

Philip Gourevitch is the inaugural Glenn & Amanda Fuhrman Chair for the Study of Language and Literature. He is teaching a course entitled Documentary Literature, introducing students to literary and rhetorical strategies in nonfiction writing.

Gourevitch is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a former editor of The Paris Review. He became widely known for his first book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (1998), which tells the story of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and his reportage, essays, criticism, and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications around the world.

Austin Sarat —

Austin Sarat holds the first-ever endowed chair for teaching college-in-prison, the Mellon Chair for the Study of the Humanities. As a faculty member, Austin leads students in an investigation into how the practices of law and politics are informed by the keeping and telling of secrets, and the telling and exposing of lies in a course called Secrets and Lies.

Sarat is an American political scientist and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. His work has centered on the death penalty, punishment, law, and most recently, lethal injection.

Rupali Warke —

Rupali Warke is a new member of BPI's core humanities faculty. An historian of South Asia, she is teaching a course entitled India Under Colonial Rule 1757-1947 and co-teachin a BA seminar called History & Anthropology Beyond the Nation-State.

Warke's research and teaching interests in South Asian history include colonialism, gender, political economy, contemporary politics, modern vernacular and print culture, cinema, and popular culture. Her current work, Secluded Capital, looks at women’s banking and vernacular capital during the opium trade in the early nineteenth century.