Jaleyna Lawes

Jaleyna Lawes is a Mellon Mays Fellow in Pierson College, majoring in the History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health, with interests that lie at the intersection of race, gender, disability, and the more-than-human world across the Black Atlantic. Her current research project examines British ship logs, legal records, colonial correspondence, parliamentary testimonies, and enslaved women’s narratives to trace discourses of madness as mapped onto captive women aboard British slave ships in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while also considering such “mad” embodiments as sites of rupture, refusal, and fugitivity for women positioned at the nexus of racialized and gendered violence. In particular, she explores how captive women’s perceived proximity to nature shaped racialized, gendered discourses of madness, while attending to the intimate entanglements between captive women and the more-than-human world both as instruments of captivity and vessels for embodiment and relation otherwise. Her project aims to make vital interventions across studies of gender and Atlantic slavery, maritime histories of medicine and materiality, and entangled formations of blackness and madness to provide critical context for understanding race, gender, madness, and materiality as inscribed into the archive and reproduced in our present. Jaleyna seeks to understand how the legacies of British slavery and colonialism continue to shape contemporary landscapes of race, gender, and mental health in the United Kingdom and the Anglophone Caribbean. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Mays & Edward A. Bouchet Fellowship, the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale, and the Shana Alexander Research Fellowship for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Beyond her own research, Jaleyna is also a research assistant at the Roberts Lab for Innovation in Race, Health, and Justice, under Carolyn Roberts, PhD, contributing primary source research for a book manuscript exploring medicine, knowledge, and power in the transatlantic slave trade. Jaleyna is also involved in various social initiatives. As an inaugural board member for the National Youth Advisory Council at CADCA, Jaleyna engaged with stakeholders across the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), CDC, and local coalitions to advocate for decarceral approaches to mental health. She also served as a student organizer for the Black Youth Mental Health Conference Series, headed by Amanda Calhoun, MD, at the Yale Child Study Center, where she convened with New Haven community members to raise awareness around psychiatric harm experienced by Black youth. Jaleyna has been involved on boards, advocacy projects, and volunteer networks for the Yale Black Women’s Coalition, Yale Undergraduate Prison Project, Yale Prison Education Initiative, and the Lowenstein Human Rights Project at Yale Law School. In her free time, you can find her collecting vintage soul and reggae records, reading Black women’s speculative fiction, or crafting new blends for bush tea.

Department: History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health