YSPH-SBS 526 Seminar Series: Dr. Jallicia Jolly, Amherst College

Dr. Jallicia Jolly is a writer, poet, and reproductive justice (RJ) organizer who is an Assistant Professor in American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College. She merges community-based research on Black women's health, grassroots activism, and political leadership with RJ organizing and practice in the United States and the Caribbean. Dr. Jolly is the founder and director of the Black Feminist Reproductive Justice, Equity, and HIV/AIDS Activism (BREHA) Collective — a new interdisciplinary, medical humanities lab that bridges research, advocacy, student collaborations, and high-impact learning experiences on the health and movement-building of Afro-diasporic girls, women, and gender diverse people. A 2022-2023 Ford Postdoctoral Fellow, her first book manuscript, Ill Erotics: Black Caribbean Women and Self-Making in the Time of HIV/AIDS, is an ethnography of the reproductive justice organizing of young Black Jamaican women living and loving with HIV that chronicles their everyday confrontations with illness, reproductive violence, and inequality in neocolonial Jamaica. Dr. Jolly leads with justice and joy as her core intention while centering new legacies of equity and community care beyond inequality and violence.