I am determined, with all my heart, to support Black women living with HIV, enhance our holistic well-being, and create new legacies beyond inequality and violence.
As a public scholar, equity practitioner, and reproductive justice organizer with investments in research-informed social action, I connect my academic work to interventions that transform structures of power, advance equity, and affirm health justice.
I am invested in improving the holistic well-being of Black and Brown women throughout the diaspora by elevating their intersectional needs, interests, and aspirations. Through my scholarship, teaching, and mentorship, I hope to encourage current and future generations with expansive visions of Black liberation, systemic change, and community-building within and beyond U.S. borders.
Justice & Joy
As an instructor, I strive to connect interdisciplinary approaches and intersectional methods to real-time teaching in ways that motivate collaboration across differences, collectively problem solve, bring people into the conversation, and engage students at various stages of their development process.
In my courses, we have very intentional, informed discussions that integrate academic work and our lived experiences, while making connections to the urgency of the current political moment. A collective learning environment is not just an intellectual community, it is a relational community invested in social transformation.”
My Herstory
Kingston-born and Brooklyn-bred, Dr. Jolly is an incoming Assistant Professor in American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College who she 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.
Currently a 2022 Ford Postdoctoral Fellow based at Yale University, Dr. Jolly's first book manuscript, Ill Erotics: Black Caribbean Women and Self-Making in the Time of HIV/AIDS (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.
Foregrounding their intimacy as sources of interdependence and connection rather than contagion and isolation, Ill Erotics explores how the politics of HIV care and self-making meet in young Black women’s everyday confrontations with illness, reproductive violence, and inequality in this unique pandemic-inflected era of HIV/AIDS in postcolonial Jamaica. She is appointed as a 2022-2023 Visiting Research faculty by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at the Yale School of Public Health to the Research Education Institute for Diverse Scholars (REIDS). Dr. Jolly connects her research to tailored community interventions that advance equity, systemic change & community-building within and beyond U.S. borders.
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.
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.
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.
As a community-engaged researcher and an equity practitioner, Dr. Jolly 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 reciprocity, sustained reflexivity, an ethics of caring, and courageous curiosity. Dr. Jolly's work has been published in American Quarterly, The Lancet, Feminist Anthropology, Souls, Meridians, and Gender, Place, and Culture.
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 connects her research to tailored community interventions that advance equity, systemic change & community-building within and beyond U.S. borders. Bridging the divides between academia and communities and theoretical and practical knowledge, Dr. Jolly works within racial justice and reproductive health equity organizations such as Women of Color Health Equity Coalition and Birth Equity and Justice Massachusetts (BEJMA).
As a co-organizer of the BEJMA Steering Committee, she foregrounds excluded voices and perspectives to develop and implement evidence-based interventions to improve Black birth outcomes and health care access while brining together clinicians, researchers, birth workers, community organizations, advocates, and legislators to collectively combat structural racism and medical violence in the reproductive health care system.
"I am determined, with all my heart, to keep generating teaching, research, scholarship, and community-based work that will enhance our collective well-being and create new legacies beyond inequality, trauma, and violence."
Beyond my academic work: I commit to making the humanities meaningful by harnessing the potential of reproductive justice theory and practice to develop and implement interventions that eliminate racial, gender, and class-based inequities in health in the Americas and the broader African diaspora.
About Me
I am a writer, poet, reproductive justice organizer and equity practitioner...