University of Colorado Denver College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Bio

Stephen John Hartnett is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at The University of Colorado Denver, where he is an Advisor to the UCD Center for Public Humanities and the editor of Captured Words / Free Thoughts, a bi-annual magazine of poems and stories crafted by imprisoned writers.

For the past 23 years, Hartnett has been teaching in, writing about, and protesting at America's prisons. He has taught college classes and poetry workshops in prisons and jails in Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, California and Colorado, and has led protests and workshops, participated on panels, and given lectures against the death penalty in 21 states. He is one of the co-founders of PCARE, a national group of scholars who work on Prison Communication Activism Research and Education. In recognition of this work, he has received numerous awards, including the Northwest Communication Association's 2008 Human Rights Award and the University of Colorado's 2010 Thomas Jefferson Award.

Working with the Department’s partners at the International College of Beijing, Hartnett has developed a passion for working, teaching, and studying in China, where he has traveled each summer since 2009. This work led, in the summer of 2012, to a trip to Hong Kong and Tibet, and has resulted in Hartnett launching a research project about the China-U.S. relationship. With the support of the Waterhouse Family Institute (affiliated with Villanova University), Hartnett and his research team will return to Tibet in the summer of 2013 to continue their research into modes of artful dissent on the “Roof of the World.”

Select Publications

“Google and the ‘Twisted Cyber Spy’ Affair: U.S.-China Communication in an Age of Globalization,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97 (2011): 411-434.

“Turning Silence into Speech and Action: Prison Activism and the Pedagogy of Empowered Citizenship,” co-authored with Jennifer K. Wood and Bryan McCann, Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 8 (2011): 331-352 (lead article).

Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex: Activism, Arts, & Educational Alternatives, editor (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming in 2011).

Executing Democracy, Volume One: Capital Punishment & The Making of America, 1683-1800 (Michigan State University Press, 2010).

"Communication, Social Justice, and Joyful Committment," The Western Journal of Communication 74 (2010): 68-93.

"Walking Amidst Heroes: Celebrating the Enlightenment & the Persistence of Democracy," Cultural Studies & Critical Methodologies 8 (2008): 187-223.

"Fighting the Prison-Industrial Complex: A Call to Communication and Cultural Studies Scholars to Change the World," Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 4 (2007):402-420

Globalization and Empire: The U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Free Markets, and The Twilight of Democracy (University of Alabama Press, 2006)

Incarceration Nation: Investigative Prison Poems of Hope and Terror (AltaMira, 2004)

Sweet Freedom’s Song: “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and Democracy in America (Oxford University Press, 2002, co-authored with the late Robert James Branham).

Democratic Dissent & The Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press, 2002)​

Courses Taught

COMM 2020, Communication and Citizenship

COMM 4040, Communication, Prisons, and Social Justice

In conjunction with COMM 4040, Hartnett takes teams of UCD students with him into Denver area prisons, where he teaches Public Speaking, Basic Composition, and Creative Writing courses.

COMM 5710, Communication, Globalization, and Social Justice