Past Modern Day Slavery & Human Trafficking Fellows

Makini Chisolm-Straker, MD MPH is the 2023-24 Argiro Fellow in the Study of Modern Slavery at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of History at Yale University. Just prior to this position, she was a White House Fellow appointed to the Office of the Commissioner at the Social Security Administration. There her portfolio included disability justice, economic mobility, housing (in)security, and racial and gender equity work. She has served in Africa, Southwest Asia, the Caribbean, Central America, and the U.S. as an emergency medicine physician and has engaged in invisible populations public health research. A leader in U.S. trafficking response efforts, Dr. Chisolm-Straker has co-edited two seminal textbooks on U.S.-based labor and sex trafficking and helped develop the country’s public health framing of anti-trafficking action. Dr. Chisolm-Straker is exploring how structural reparations can eliminate system-based precarity and her Spring 2024 course is entitled, “Precarity as policy: A U.S. history of structural inequity.”

Global Health Scholar & Researcher, Global Mental Health Division (Anti-Trafficking Program and the Clinic for International Trauma Survivors); Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Baylor College of Medicine

Project: “The Intersection of Rights and Risks: A Public Health Response to Human Trafficking”

Juris Doctorate, University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor, MI, 1993
Former Director, US Office to Monitor/Combat Trafficking in Persons
Project: “The 13th Amendment and the History of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.”

Brown Bag Talk: February 13, 2019
A MacMillan Center interview with Ambassador Luis C.deBaca on human trafficking
Ambassador Luis C.deBaca talks about modern day slavery on the MacMillan Report

Ambassador (ret.) Luis C.deBaca coordinated U.S. government activities in the global fight against contemporary forms of slavery as head of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons during the Obama Administration. As one of the United States’ most decorated federal prosecutors, Ambassador C.deBaca investigated and prosecuted crimes of human trafficking, immigration, hate crimes, money laundering, and official misconduct. He updated the post-Civil War statutes and the 13th Amendment to develop the “victim centered approach” to modern slavery, which has become the global standard for combating human trafficking through the Trafficking in Persons Protocol to the United Nations’ Organized Crime Convention. Ambassador C.deBaca advises governments, businesses, and civil society on transparency in supply chains and enforcement. He is a Open Society Human Rights Fellow and is on the faculty of Yale University, where he is the Robina Fellow in Modern Slavery at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition of the MacMillan Center.

2019-2020

Stephanie Redden, GLC Postdoctoral Associate: July 1, 2019—June 31, 2020 (PhD, Political Science, Carleton University) Project: “Hello from the Inside: Race, Gender, and Unfree Labor with the Transnationally-Situated Prison Call Centre Industry”. Brown Bag Talk: January 29, 2020 (event page)

2017-2018

Amelia Hintzen, Ruth J. Simmons Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University. GLC Postdoctoral Associate: August- December 2017. Book Project: “Sugarcane Citizenship: Migration, Race, and the Nation in the Dominican Republic” (Podcast episode)
Gunther Peck, Associate Professor of History, Duke University. GLC Visiting Associate Professor & Robina Fellow in Modern Slavery: August 2017-May 2018. Book Project: “The Shadow of White Slavery: Race, Empire, and History in Contemporary Campaigns to Abolish Human Trafficking” (Podcast episode)

2016-2017

Wendy Hesford, Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies The Ohio State University (September 2016-May 2017), “Enslaved Girlhoods: Human Trafficking Law, Literature, and Abolitionist Rhetoric.” During the Fall 2016 semester, Dr. Hesford is teaching an undergraduate seminar, “Human Trafficking and Modern-Day Slavery,” in the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Department. Wendy was interviewed by Yale University’s MacMillian Center. (Podcast episode)
Tammy Ingram, Associate Professor of History, College of Charleston (September 2016-May 2017). “The Wickedest City in America: Sex, Race, and Organized Crime in the Jim Crow South.” During the Spring 2017 semester, Dr. Ingram will be teaching an undergraduate seminar, “Neo-Slavery in the Jim Crow South: Sex, Race, and Forced Labor after the Civil War,” in the History Department. Professor Ingram is the inaugural Robina Fellow for Modern Slavery at the GLC. You can find an interviewed with Professor Ingram by Yale University’s MacMillan Center here. (Podcast episode)
Elena Shih, Assistant Professor, American Studies and Ethnic Studies, Brown University (October 2016) “The Price of Freedom: Moral and Political Economies of Human Trafficking in China, Thailand, and the U.S.” (Podcast episode)

2015-2016

Genevieve LeBaron, Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield (Sept-Oct 2015, January-May 2016) “Understanding and Governing the Contemporary Global Business of Forced Labor”

2014-2015

Rebecca S. Prichard, Lecturer in Theatre Studies, Essex University, “Carnevale” a play mixing slavery in 18th Century Venice and modern trafficking

2013-2014

Kerry Ward, Associate Professor, Rice University, “Ground Zero: The explosion of anti-human trafficking initiatives in Houston, Texas”

2012-2013

Jessica Pliley, Assistant Professor of History, Texas State University, “The FBI’s Local White Slavery Corps: The Fight Against Sex Trafficking and the Growth of the Associative State, 1910-1919”