Bio

Mia Florin-Sefton is a Lecturer in the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) Program. Prior to coming to Stanford, she taught in the English Department, the Core Curriculum, and the Center for Justice in Education at Columbia University.

A specialist in post-1865 American literature and culture, her first book project, The Disinherited: A 20th-Century Literary History of America, offers a cultural and intellectual history of the figure of “the disinherited” in post-1865 American fiction. She is also at work on a second book project—tentatively titled The Classroom and the Cell—which is motivated by one central question: What history of prisons and higher education emerges when we examine who has been encouraged to teach in prisons at different historical moments. More broadly, her research and teaching interests span political economy, gender and sexuality studies, intellectual history, critical race theory, settler colonial studies, the history of the novel, critical university studies, carceral studies, and the politics of prison education.

Her research has been recognized with the Miron Cristo-Loveanu Prize from Columbia University and the Jean Helen Macleod Prize from the University of Edinburgh, and supported by the Humanities Center Initiative, the Heyman Center, and the Thouron Award. You can find her academic writing in Novel, Diacritics, Feminist Modernist Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Post45, among other venues.

Academic Appointments

  • COLLEGE Lecturer, Civic, Liberal, and Global Education

2026-27 Courses