Our Featured Fellow for September 2023 is Felicia A. Henry, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware.

Felicia joined the Bill Anderson Fund as a Fellow in 2019. She served on the BAF  Programming Committee from 2019-2021 and presented her paper “The Disaster of Injustice: COVID-19 and Prisons” during the Bill Anderson Fund Lightning Talks at the 2020 Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop. She also served as Chair of the BAF Student Council for 2021-2022. 

As an intersectional Black woman artivist scholar, Felicia has done extensive work nationally and internationally in professional, academic, personal, and artistic roles with women, men, and young people involved in the criminal legal system and organizations and agencies both within and outside the system. Previously, Felicia was the Director of Research and Policy at the Correctional Association of New York (CANY), where she developed and implemented a research agenda to track the impact of COVID-19 on incarcerated people in NYS prisons. Other past roles include Program Manager for Diversion and Reintegration at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ), where she oversaw the implementation of an array of diversion, re-entry, and gender-specific programming that served individuals leaving New York City’s jails. 

A Licensed Social Worker (LMSW), Felicia received her Master of Social Work degree from the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, “Invisible and Hypervisible: The Impact of the Carceral State on Black Women’s Disaster Experience,” uses COVID-19 as the context to explore the constraints of criminal legal involvement for Black women under community supervision. She plans to defend in the Fall 2023 semester and is currently on the job market.  

Felicia is a Spring 2023 National Science Foundation (NSF) Law and Society Dissertation Grant Awardee (administered through Arizona State University). She is also a recipient of the Unidel Award in Sociology & Criminal Justice and the University Unidel Distinguished Graduate Scholar Award. Additionally, she received the 2021 Natural Hazards Center Graduate Student Scholar award. Her work has been funded by the University of Delaware and published in Critical Criminology, Corrections: Policy, Practice, and Research, Environmental Justice, Journal of Crime and Delinquency, and Journal of Community Psychology. She has also published on public-facing platforms such as WHYY and Medium. Additionally, Felicia is the Founder of Behind the Walls, Between the Lines (BTWBTL), a movement to deepen the awareness of the legacy of racial inequity in America, particularly within carceral control, and inspire activism aimed at its dismantlement.

In her spare time, Felicia loves to hone her barista skills and try specialty coffee from the major coffee regions of the world. 

You can find Felicia’s publications here and connect with her on LinkedIn here. 

RESEARCH INTERESTS: race, ethnicity, gender, class, carceral studies/geography, environmental sociology, social vulnerability, and community disaster resilience.