Current Graduate Fellows

Layla Brooks

I am a PhD candidate at Emory University. My dissertation explores how the intersection of ethnicity and gender shape political behavior and empowerment when ethnicity and/or gender have been made salient by policy changes or political elites. I focus on Kenya and the United States where: (1) ethnicity has been politicized and (2) women/women’s issues have been at the forefront in elections. These two cases exemplify how the ethnicization of politics influences minority women’s political empowerment. My research has been highlighted in media outlets, Al Jazeera and Georgia Public Broadcasting.

I utilize theories of black feminist thought and black political behavior to emphasize doubly marginalized groups’ political empowerment centered around citizens of the African diaspora. My research also considers how institutional factors influence women and women of color in legislatures. I examine women’s legislative candidacy In Malawi and Zambia, while in the U.S., I examine legislative leadership intersectionally.

I hold a Bachelor of Arts in World Politics with minors in African Studies and Women & Gender Studies from Michigan State University. Here, I was a Political Science Scholar, member of the Dean’s Student Advisory Council, and an IPPSR Student Fellow.

Ayssa Yamaguti Norek

I am a carceral studies scholar and social and cultural historian of modern Latin America, with broad experience in Brazilian history, and am currently finishing my Ph.D. in Emory University’s Department of History. A former Woodruff Fellow, I am now a SIRE Fellow at Emory College of Arts and Sciences’ Pathway Center. In my dissertation titled “Solid Walls, Blurred Borders: Imperial Architectures of Carcerality in São Paulo’s Modern Penitentiary, 1821-1889,” I examine the conception, construction, and development of São Paulo’s first modern penitentiary between 1821 and 1889. By reconstructing the institution’s imperial history through prison documents, provincial records, and legislation, my dissertation examines how the penitentiary system in Brazil blurred the lines of punishment, labor, slavery, and urban growth during the nineteenth century. Part of a global phenomenon of disciplined punishment, São Paulo’s House of Correction operated within, and oftentimes for, Brazil’s slave society in which labor was based on unfreedom. Piecing together fragmentary archival documents, my dissertation provides a picture of how incarceration in nineteenth-century Brazil affected the lives and freedom statuses of free, freed, and enslaved populations alike.