Jaleyna Lawes, a member of the Yale College Class of 2026, has been awarded a Beinecke Scholarship, which will support her pursuit of a Ph.D. in history.
She was one of 20 college juniors nationwide to receive the competitive scholarship, which supports students of exceptional promise who plan to continue their studies in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
Lawes, who is also a Mellon Mays Fellow at Yale, is majoring in the History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health, with interests at the intersection of race, gender, disability, and the more-than-human world across the Black Atlantic.
In her research, she 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.
She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in history, in which she will continue to explore race, gender, and madness as inscribed into the archive and echoed in our present, bridging archival inquiry with advocacy and praxis toward decolonial landscapes of healing and care.
With this newest cohort, 759 students, including 17 Yalies, have received the prestigious scholarship since it was created in 1975.
Each scholar receives $5,000 immediately prior to entering graduate school and an additional $30,000 while attending graduate school.
