Dear Charles Dickens, Love, South LA

Jacqueline Jean 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.

“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.”—Ryan Fong, founding codirector, Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom