Argiro Fellowship in the Study of Modern Slavery

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC), part of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, invites applications for the inaugural Argiro Fellowship in the Study of Modern Slavery. The GLC seeks to promote a better understanding of all aspects of the institution of slavery from the earliest times to the present. Argiro Fellows may study the global history of racism, slavery, and abolition, with an emphasis on its modern-day forms, impact, and eradication and recovery efforts. Scholars from all disciplines, both traditional academics as well as writers, researchers, and artists without academic institutional affiliation, are encouraged to apply. This new fellowship is sponsored by a generous gift from Vincent Argiro, Yale, ’77, modern antislavery activist and entrepreneur.

Current Fellow 

Makini Chisolm-Straker, MD MPH, GLC Argiro Fellow in the Study of Modern Slavery, September 2023—May 2024

Makini Chisolm-Straker, MD MPH is the 2023-24 Argiro Fellow in the Study of Modern Slavery at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of History at Yale University. Just prior to this position, she was a White House Fellow appointed to the Office of the Commissioner at the Social Security Administration. There her portfolio included disability justice, economic mobility, housing (in)security, and racial and gender equity work. She has served in Africa, Southwest Asia, the Caribbean, Central America, and the U.S. as an emergency medicine physician and has engaged in invisible populations public health research. A leader in U.S. trafficking response efforts, Dr. Chisolm-Straker has co-edited two seminal textbooks on U.S.-based labor and sex trafficking and helped develop the country’s public health framing of anti-trafficking action. Dr. Chisolm-Straker is exploring how structural reparations can eliminate system-based precarity and her Spring 2024 course is entitled, “Precarity as policy: A U.S. history of structural inequity.”

Inaugural Fellow

Melissa I. M. Torres, PhD, MSW, GLC Argiro Fellow in the Study of Modern Slavery, January—May 2023

Global Health Scholar & Researcher, Global Mental Health Division (Anti-Trafficking Program and the Clinic for International Trauma Survivors); Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Baylor College of Medicine
Project: “The Intersection of Rights and Risks: A Public Health Response to Human Trafficking”