Yale University

Jallicia Jolly , Ph.D.

Roles:
  • Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor, Amherst College
  • Fellow, Research Education Institute for Diverse Scholars (REIDS)
Contact:

Biography:

Dr. Jolly applies a transnational Black feminist, interdisciplinary, and intersectional lens to her research and tailored community interventions that elevate the needs and health of Black women. She researches and teaches on Black women’s health, grassroots activism, and reproductive justice; intersectionality and the transnational politics of HIV/AIDS; Black feminist health science, Black motherhood, and birth equity. Her current work examines how structural, institutional, and social contexts influence how young Black women live with HIV while navigating social stigma, economic marginalization, and reproductive violence. 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 that explores how the politics of HIV care and self-making meet in young Black women’s everyday confrontations with illness and inequality in this unique pandemic-inflected era of HIV/AIDS in postcolonial Jamaica.

A reproductive justice organizer and community-based researcher, Dr. Jolly is invested in the power of communal problem-solving against illness and inequality. Currently a Visiting Researcher at Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, her work uses qualitative and quantitative methods to critically examine: A) Black women’s experiences of psychosocial support and the complexities of the economic survival strategies that they employ throughout the COVID- 19 pandemic; and B) reproductive coercion, obstetric racism, and medical violence in Black maternal health experiences. Dr. Jolly intervenes in conventional biomedical approaches to HIV by centering interventions that are holistic, culturally-rooted, and community-oriented. As a co-organizer of the racial equity and reproductive justice group, MA COVID-19 Maternal Equity Coalition, she develops and implements evidence-based interventions to improve Black birth outcomes and health care access while combating structural racism and reproductive violence in the health care system.

Dr. Jolly hopes that her work can yield meaningful humanistic and scientific knowledge that helps enhance our collective well-being. She is determined, with all her heart, to generate inclusive scholarship, research, and interventions that will support Black women across the African diaspora and to create new legacies beyond inequality and violence. Dr. Jolly's REIDS mentors are Drs. Bridgette Brawner and Barbara Guthrie.