Jocelyn Sears is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard University and a doctoral fellow with the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. Her dissertation project, “Future Forms: Narrative Voice and Literary Form in the Dystopian Novel,” analyzes a selection of 20th- and 21st-century novels, exploring the political and philosophical implications of writers’ narrative choices for depicting imagined futures. With support from HMUI, she is writing a chapter that focuses on “we” narrators, investigating how authors use the plural first-person voice to represent the complexities of social belonging and urban collectivity within dystopian settings, with particular attention to the ways in which urban architecture shapes the contours of social and psychological possibility in these fictional worlds. Before coming to Harvard, she earned a BA with honors in English from Stanford University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. She has also worked in digital media, as a staff researcher for mental_floss and a podcast researcher for iHeartMedia.