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Lycoming College will host Michelle Daniel Jones, Ph.D., for the 25th annual Strauser Lecture. Daniel Jones’ talk, “The Embodied Observer: Rewriting US Women’s Prison History,” is slated for Thursday, March 26, at 5 p.m., in the Jane Schultz Room in the Wertz Student Center. The event is free and open to the public.
Daniel Jones is part of the Indiana Women’s Prison History Project, a group of incarcerated women at the Indiana Women’s Prison who compiled a history of the Indiana Reformatory Institute for Women and Girls. During her talk, she will discuss the book she co-authored and edited while incarcerated, “Who Would Believe a Prisoner?” the 2024 National Council on Public History Book of the Year Award winner, which sheds light on historical continuities in prisons’ invasion of women’s sexual, familial, and reproductive lives.
In histories of gynecological experimentation and eugenic confinement, for example, she and other student-researchers found precursors of their experiences of medical abuse and ruined reproductive years. As “embodied observers” of archival materials, this group of scholars claimed authority of the narrative and critiqued the supposedly progressive origin of prisons segregated by sex. Drawing on philosopher Miranda Fricker’s concepts of epistemic injustice and epistemic privilege, the History Project scholars overturned the disqualification of their status as knowers and as experts, instead wielding their lived experience as a more expansive lens with which to view the archive than is available to traditional historians.
Daniel Jones completed a doctoral degree in the American studies program at New York University in 2025. She is a founding member and executive director of Constructing Our Future, a reentry and housing organization for women created by herself and other incarcerated colleagues inside the Indiana Women’s Prison. Daniel Jones is a community organizer who has held multiple fellowships. She is a co-founder of the FIRE Collective, an interdisciplinary research collective currently studying post-traumatic prison disorder.
As an organizer, collaborator, and subject matter expert Daniel Jones creates opportunities to speak truth to power and serves in the development and operation of taskforces and initiatives to reduce harm and end mass incarceration. Daniel Jones has worked with Second Chance Educational Alliance, Women Transcending Oral History Project, and the Survivor’s Justice Project as a senior research consultant. She serves on the boards of Worth Rises and the Correctional Association of New York and served on the advisory boards of the Jamii Sisterhood, the Education Trust, A Touch of Light, the Urban Institute, American Prison Writing Archive and ITHAKA's Higher Education in Prison Research project.
As an artist, Daniel Jones is interested in finding ways to funnel her research pursuits into theater, dance, and photography, with multiple productions and gallery installations.
With the annual Strauser Lecture Series, Lycoming honors the legacy of Professor Larry R. Strauser, who began the criminal justice major at Lycoming College in 1975. He envisioned a unique interdisciplinary curriculum at a liberal arts college that would contribute to the reformation of the criminal justice system. Under Strauser’s direction the program grew, and today many alumni hold successful criminal justice careers. Past speakers include Ramiro Martinez, Ph.D., professor of sociology and criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University; Thomas Vanaskie ’75, federal judge of the U.S. District Court of the Middle District of Pennsylvania; and Elijah Anderson, Ph.D., the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University.