Jaleyna Lawes

Jaleyna Lawes is a junior in Pierson College, majoring in the History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health with a concentration in Gender, Reproduction, and the Body. Her interests lie at the intersection of race, gender, and disability, with a particular focus on early modern discourses of madness as mapped onto captive women aboard the Middle Passage. Her current project engages British ship logs, parliamentary testimonies and public-facing texts as well as autobiographical narratives surrounding the experiences of women on the Middle Passage. She aims to trace entangled constructions of race, gender, and madness at the peak of the British slave trade and abolitionist discourse, as well as to investigate “mad” acts as sites of rupture, fugitivity, and refusal for captive women positioned at the nexus of racialized and gendered violence. Jaleyna seeks to understand how the legacies of British slavery continue to shape contemporary landscapes of race, gender, medicine, and mental health in the United Kingdom. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Mays and Edward A. Bouchet Fellowship Program, as well as the Shana Alexander Research Fellowship for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Beyond her individual research, Jaleyna is also a research assistant for Professor Carolyn Roberts towards a book project exploring medicine, knowledge, and power in the transatlantic slave trade. She is also involved in various social initiatives. She served as a student assistant for the Black Youth Mental Health Conference Series, headed by Amanda Calhoun, MD, at the Yale Child Study Center. She has also been involved in the Yale Black Women’s Coalition, the Yale Prison Education Initiative, the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, and the Lowenstein Human Rights Project.

Department: History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health