Jacqueline Jean Barrios, Ph.D. '21

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A new book by Jacqueline Jean Barrios, Ph.D. '21, who earned her doctorate in English literature, is set to be published this month.

"Dear Charles Dickens, Love, South LA: Literature, Place, and Belonging" tells the story of how students at Foshay Learning Center, a public school in South Los Angeles, studied Charles Dickens as part of their AP English curriculum, and how, in that journey, a fellow traveler emerged: the city itself.

Barrios confronts the cultural challenges that big canonical books pose to new generations of readers. Instead of erasing the differences between Dickens’s implied audiences and his current ones, Barrios demonstrates how youth can serve as the visionaries who bridge the gap. By placing literature in everyday surroundings, students at any school and in any location can learn from the embodied and the poetic and even question the universalism that masks unexamined reverence for the Western canon.

John O. Jordan, cofounder of the Dickens Project, states, “As its title suggests, this book is something of a testimonial or love letter from a group of South LA high school students about learning to read and engage productively with the long-form nineteenth-century English novel, especially the novels of Dickens. It is also a sophisticated and practical first-hand account by the brilliant teacher who guided her students on this journey. In 'Dear Charles Dickens, Love, South LA,' Jacqueline Barrios develops a compelling rationale for what she calls ‘emplaced reading’ that enables readers to bring together their own experiences with the worlds of canonical Victorian fiction.”

Ryan Fong, founding codirector of Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, says, “As public discourse swirls about the ‘death of the humanities,’ Barrios offers a striking and convincing case for the transformative work that happens when communities come together to engage a text...'Dear Charles Dickens, Love, South LA' provides a beautiful and urgently needed example of what the public humanities can and should be...and the ways that urban spaces can become vital laboratories for literary study.”

Barrios is assistant professor of public and applied humanities at the University of Arizona. She co-leads the Urban Humanities Network and directs creative place-keeping initiatives centered on the historical, cultural and environmental resilience of the Borderlands. Barrios lives in Tucson, Arizona.