Juyoun Jang, Ph.D.

I am a first-generation scholar-practitioner and activist. I firmly believe that learning is a fugitive activity that decolonizes, liberates, and humanizes us and our communities. I have taught both traditional and nontraditional students in universities and prisons. My pedagogical goal is to prompt the values of multiculturalism, belonging, and social justice advocacy by teaching African/Black and multiethnic literature in and outside academic settings. I have committed to building collaborative learning spaces for undergraduate and incarcerated students through educational programs such as the Prison-to-College Pipeline program (The University of Mississippi), the African American poetry course (Sewanee: The University of the South), and the Inside-Out Program (Washington College). 

My research is inspired by my students at Parchman/the Mississippi State Penitentiary. I am currently working on a book project titled “Fugitivity, Confinement, and the Afterlife of Slavery in Contemporary African American Migration Narratives” and co-editing the Global South special issue “Resistance and Incarceration” (Fall 2025). My co-interview with Robby Faruq Wideman, “Robby’s Life in the Wake of Incarceration” (tentative) will be published through the Global South (Fall 2025). In addition, my article, “Spiritual Migration as Community Mothering: The Black Feminist Radical Imagination of Assata Shakur in Her Autobiography and Incarcerated Men in Parchman/the Mississippi State Penitentiary,” will be included in the book Other Mothers and Community Mothering (Demeter Press 2025). Furthermore, I am revising articles about fugitive pedagogy and formerly incarcerated author and educator Robert Faruq Wideman’s co-written memoir, Brothers and Keepers. I have also translated Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir into Korean.