Kelly Andriamasindray, PhD’21 (History)
I've always had a sort of fascination for North America and the United States in particular, because it's a country that has always presented itself as the sort of paragon of democracy and civil rights.
At the same time, you have these glaring inequalities that have punctuated the whole history of the country. I was always interested in this huge contrast between what the country would like to be or would like the rest of the world to believe and what is actually going on. It truly is very interesting from an intellectual point of view.
I'm researching the encounters of African American women with the criminal justice system in California from the late 19th century until roughly the mid-20th century. It's about examining the patterns in the shaping of disproportionate incarceration of African Americans through a gender perspective and also a very local one.
I'm really trying to focus on discovering who those women were, where they came from and why they got to be arrested, and also trying to see, even though it's difficult, where we can see racism is playing in their arrest and carceral detention, their treatment in prison and also what happened to them after prison.
We know that today the United States is the country that has the highest number of incarcerated people in the world. And what some people don't know is that California is actually one of the main contributors to this situation. There are a crazy number of incarcerated people in California in particular. So I was really interested in going back to the roots and trying to see why there are so many African Americans incarcerated back in the late 19th century when the Black population of California wasn’t even 1%.
I wanted to study at Brandeis in particular. Firstly for the faculty, especially in the African and African American studies, and history departments. And I was really attracted by the small setting and small classes and the feeling of belonging to a community and also, obviously the geographical location, being near Boston.
Brandeis has a surprisingly very diverse student body, which is something I am very amazed by, considering how small the university is. That diversity is very striking and is something I really, really enjoy.
Kelly Andriamasindray studies modern African American history. Her research interests center around the policing of racial minorities, the discourse on Black criminality and the carceral state. Her dissertation-in-progress is titled "'The Greatest State for the Negro?' African American Women and the Criminal Justice System in California, 1890-1950s."