Stephen John Hartnett is a Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver and the Director of the University of Colorado’s College-in-Prison Program. He served as the 2017 President of the National Communication Association, and is the Founding Editor of Captured Words/Free Thoughts, the annual magazine of prison-made poetry, politics, and art. He is the Editor of the Michigan State University Press book series on “U.S.-China Relations in the Age of Globalization.”
Hartnett’s work as a historian of American culture and politics has appeared in his award-winning books Democratic Dissent & the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America, the 2-volume Executing Democracy: Capital Punishment & the Making of America, and, co-authored with the late Robert James Branham, Sweet Freedom’s Song: My Country ‘Tis of Thee and Democracy in America. His work on U.S. foreign policy has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, the South Atlantic Quarterly, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Text and Performance Quarterly, the Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and others. His Globalization and Empire was published in 2006; the co-edited Imagining China: Rhetorics of Nationalism in the Age of Globalization was published in 2017. His most recent book, A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War, was published in 2021. His current project, The Loss of China and the Rise of Cold War Populism is forthcoming in the fall of 2025.
As evidence of the excellence of this scholarly work, Hartnett has received the 2013 Kohrs-Campbell Prize in Rhetorical Criticism, CU Denver’s College of Liberal Arts and Science’s 2012 Excellence in Research and Creative Activities Award, the NCA’s 2011 Golden Monograph Award, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency’s 2011 PASS Award (Prevention for a Safer Society), the NCA’s 2002 Winans and Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, and the 2019 Xiao Award for Outstanding Research in Rhetoric from the Association for Chinese Communication Studies.
Hartnett has spent the past sixteen summers (excepting the COVID years of 2020 and 2021) working in China, Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong, Nepal, and India, where he has been gathering data, photographs, and interviews. Working in partnership with the National Communication Association and colleagues across China, he has co-organized and co-hosted conferences in Beijing in 2015, 2016, 2018, and 2023; in Shenzhen in 2019; and in online format for the Shanghai International Studies University in 2021. He is one of the leaders of the forthcoming Fifth Biennial Conference on Communication, Media, and Governance, to be held in Beijing, China, in June 2025.
Hartnett has spent the past 35 years teaching in, writing about, and protesting at America’s prisons and jails. He has taught in prisons and jails in Colorado, California, Texas, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, and has lectured on prisons and/or the death penalty in 28 states. His commentary on prison education has appeared on MSNBC and in outlets such as Slate, Salon, In These Times, and over 100 different radio stations. He is the editor of Challenging the Prison Industrial Complex and the co-editor of Working for Justice: A Handbook for Prison Educators and Activists, both published by the University of Illinois Press. As recognition of this work, Hartnett won the University of Colorado’s Thomas Jefferson Award.