Dr. Jallicia Jolly is a post-doctoral fellow and incoming Assistant Professor in American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College. Dr. Jolly researches and teaches on Black women’s health, grassroots activism, and reproductive justice; the transnational politics of gender, structural racism, sexuality, class, and health; intersectionality and HIV/AIDS in the U.S. and Caribbean; Black feminist health science, Black motherhood, and birth justice. Dr. Jolly's first book manuscript, Ill Erotics: Black Caribbean Women and Self-Making in the Time of HIV/AIDS, now under contract with the University of California Press, is an ethnography and oral history of the reproductive justice organizing of young Black Jamaican women living with HIV that chronicles how they build empowerment and self-care around disability, class oppression, severe impoverishment, violence, and lack of access to health care. As a community-engaged researcher and an equity practitioner, she dedicates her work to improving the well-being of marginalized communities while elevating the organizing and interests of women in the African diaspora using human rights and reproductive justice frameworks. Her scholarship and community-engaged work foregrounds the interrelationship between lived experience, pedagogy, and political engagement, and is invested in the values of sustained reflexivity, an ethics of caring, and reciprocity.
Graduating from the University from Michigan in summer 2020, Dr. Jolly holds a doctorate and master's in American Culture, and certificates in Women’s & Gender Studies, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Science, Technology & Society as well as in Center for Research on Learning and Teaching and Diversity & Equity. Dr. Jolly conducted her doctoral research in Kingston, Jamaica, completing over 18 months of ethnographic work across multiple sites including local communities, HIV clinics, nonprofit and governmental organizations, medical institutions, and global health agencies. She uses ethnographic methods of "vulnerable observation," participant observation, and semi-structured interviews, as well as qualitative research methods including oral history, cultural analyses, focus groups, surveys, and media content analyses. Rooted in transnational Black feminist and reproductive justice frameworks, her scholarship is invested in expanding the geographic and thematic scope of studies of Black women's health, activism, and political leadership. She remains remain attentive to the ethics and politics of documenting inequality, illness, and violence, and is deeply committed to liberatory practices for doing culturally-relevant, ethically and politically invested work that creates a more just present and future.
A public scholar committed to research-informed action, Dr. Jolly has written for various media outlets such as The Washington Post/The Lily, USA Today, Ms. Magazine, Huffington Post, Rewire News, Nursing Clio, Black Youth Project, National Center for Institutional Diversity’s Spark Magazine, and the University of Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School Blog.
Dr. Jolly’s scholarship has been recognized and funded by the U.S. Student Fulbright Program, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Brown University's Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, the American Association of University Women, Yale University’s Sarah Petit Doctoral Fellowship in Queer Studies, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Edward Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, the National Women's Studies Association, and the University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities and the the Institute for Research on Women & Gender. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a minor in Africana Studies and Spanish, receiving high honors from Williams College. A 2012 Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, she was also a recipient of the Gaius C. Bolin 1889 Prize in Africana Studies, the Nancy McIntire Prize in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Gilman International Fellowship. Dr. Jolly's work has been published in American Quarterly, The Lancet, Feminist Anthropology, Souls, Meridians, and Gender, Place, and Culture.