About

LeShae Henderson is a Paul S. Lazarsfeld fellow and a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Sociology at Columbia University. She studies questions relating to race and racial boundary making, incarceration, and inequality. She is particularly interested in how people and institutions create, impose, and reify racial boundaries. To explore these topics, she draws largely on qualitative interview-based methodologies and mixed methods approaches.

LeShae’s dissertation project uses Hawai’i’s prison system as a case study to understand how indigeneity is defined, utilized, and experienced in prisons. Through this work, she explores how Native Hawaiian cultural practices and identities persist in an institution that is historically meant to “strip away the self.” LeShae’s research is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship, the Reducing Inequality Network, and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.

Her other projects examine the causes and consequences of incarceration, the health of incarcerated people, and inequalities related to the criminal legal system. As a graduate student, LeShae works at the Columbia Justice Lab where she is a graduate research assistant. She has assisted on the New York Reentry Study, the Rikers Island Longitudinal Study, and the Vaccine Acceptance in Prison project.

Before beginning her doctoral studies, LeShae worked at the Vera Institute of Justice. She also helped produce the Decarcerated Podcast. LeShae received her B.A. in Sociology from Harvard College.

LeShae’s work is deeply informed by her experiences as a proud native of Hawai’i, a Black woman, a big sister, an aunty, and a lover of hula and music.