By Eva Clark
UC Santa Barbara graduate student Clint Terrell has been awarded a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship for his work examining themes of redemption in prison literature and narratives.
Ford Foundation judges look for academic achievement and a promising career in teaching or research among applicants enrolled in either a Ph.D. or Sc.D. program. This prestigious fellowship is given to 70 individuals nationally, with recipients receiving a $27,000 stipend annually for three years.
Terrell grew up in El Dorado County, California where he was incarcerated as a juvenile for commercial burglary with a gang enhancement two decades ago. He also served time as an adult for residential burglary and auto theft and completed his sentence back in 2008.
After his own experience with incarceration, Terrell channeled his passion for reading classical literature in prison to obtaining a college education and further exploring narratives of prisoners. Upon completing his undergraduate studies at Cabrillo College and UC Berkeley, he joined UCSB’s English Department in 2018.
Clint Terrell is a UCSB English Department graduate student who has won a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. He focuses on themes of redemption in prison narratives and literature.
In a recent interview, Terrell described how he became inspired to pursue his Ph.D., why he chose prison narratives, and how the Ford Foundation Fellowship will impact his work and its societal reach.
Q: Can you speak about the academic journey that eventually brought you to UCSB?
A: I was incarcerated for a number of years and I ran into someone who I was incarcerated with who told me he was going to community college and he was transferring to Berkeley and kind of gave me the whole rundown on the college thing. He was declaring an English major and so I asked him, “Why are you going to be an English major, you know?” And he said, “When I was locked up I read all these books, like I was reading Shakespeare and all this stuff.” That’s the culture in there when you’re incarcerated. I kind of walked into community college, and met with the college counselor not really knowing what I was talking about. I didn’t even know what a Ph.D. was. He broke me down the classes and I started class. I transferred to Berkeley as an English major. I finished my undergraduate there and I applied to UCSB and I got in here to UCSB.
Q: How did you narrow down your research focus to themes of redemption within prison literature?
A: I was involved in the Underground Scholars at UC Berkeley which is a formerly incarcerated student organization. It was one of the first. I wrote my senior thesis on Jimmy Santiago Baca. He’s a Chicano poet who also was imprisoned and wrote a memoir about being imprisoned. Since then I have been doing research on prison literature and prisoner autobiography.
Jimmy Santiago Baca gained renown for his memoir of prison life. Baca’s work has inspired UCSB graduate student Clint Terrell in research that has earned him a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.
There’s kind of the overarching commonality in prison literature, the theme of redemption and how a lot of scholars of prisoner literature read that and read it through a Foucauldian paradigm. The paradigm says these narratives of redemption actually reinforce the ideology of the prison. All these narratives posit the prison as the place where transformation took place, reinforcing the logic and the necessity for prisons in the first place.
Q: What will winning the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship mean for your work going forward?
A: Well, for one, it’s nice to have my work validated. Especially as a nontraditional student, as a first-generation student, as somebody who more or less dropped out of high school and was not really sure what I was doing here or if I was doing the work right. To be awarded this was kind of a reassurance. Since I’m studying some of these old histories in relation to prison transformation, like Aztec history and Viking history, I am planning on going to Sweden to study with a Norwegian scholar, Odinism and religious movements and stuff like that.
Q: Do any aspects of your research tie into current political or social movements?
A: In 2013. there was a hunger strike in California prisons that involved 30,000 prisoners. What really caught my attention as someone who had been incarcerated previously and spent time in the California prison system was how the hunger strike was between all of the different races, between these historically rival prison gangs. They all came together and wrote a document called the Agreement to End Hostilities. I look at how these extreme conditions brought all of these races together that were previously attacking each other for decades, for 30 years or more, and how that really changed the entire landscape of and culture of prison.
Eva Clark is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Communication. She wrote this article for her Writing Program class, Journalism for Web and Social Media.