J. Felix Gallion is a first-generation scholar and PhD candidate in the English department and a lecturer in the Cinema & Media Studies Program at The University of Pennsylvania. He earned a bachelor’s in English and American Studies from Cornell University where he was also a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellow, and he earned a master’s in English from The University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation, “Migrant Farmworker Testimonios: On Abolition and Ethnic Mexican Agricultural Labor Migration,” explores how ethnic Mexican migrant farmworkers represent agricultural labor as carceral labor, in literature and other media, including testimony, and it analyzes the coalitional potential for abolition that inheres in their strategies of representation. In 2020, Gallion was chosen as an Emerging Scholar of Color by the University of Houston-Downtown’s Center for Latino Studies, and his work has also been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.

M.A., English, University of Pennsylvania (2018)

B.A. with distinction, English and American Studies, Cornell University (2011)