Brandi M. Waters is a Ph.D. candidate in the departments of History and African American Studies. Her research examines the history of slavery, medicine, and law in the Atlantic World, with specific interests in Colombia, Brazil, and the United States. Her dissertation, provisionally entitled, “Debating ‘defects’: Slavery, Disability and Legal Medicine in Late Colonial Colombia,” traces these themes during the last century of colonial rule (approximately 1680-1810). It explores the influence of medico-scientific knowledge and public health reforms on the administration of justice, and highlights enslaved people’s use of the law to protect their health and well being as constitutive of early practices of legal medicine. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, and by Yale’s Program in the History of Science and Medicine and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

She is a Graduate Affiliate on the Council of Latin American & Iberian Studies, and has served as a Fellow in the Office for Graduate Student Development & Diversity, and as a Digital Humanities Teaching Fellow. She is the Mellon Dissertation Fellow in the Program of African American History at The Library Company of Philadelphia for 2019/20.