Indy Davis, from the Netherlands, is a Ph.D. student in 19th-century U.S. history with a focus on legal history.

Before coming to Princeton, Indy earned her Bachelors degree in Afro-American studies from the W.E.B. Du Bois department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. During her time there, she was awarded the Shirley Graham Du Bois Writing Award for her senior thesis titled “Guarding the Borders of Freedom: The Legal Guardianship of Free People of Color in the Nineteenth-Century South.”

Indy is a President’s Fellow at Princeton and a Social Impact Fellow through GradFUTURES. She is also involved with the Princeton & Slavery Project. Since moving to the United States, Indy has volunteered to support incarcerated people. In Massachusetts she worked with the Petey Greene Program in the prison education sector. Currently, she works with the Dutch Probation Services (Reclassering Nederland) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by visiting Dutch citizens incarcerated in the United States to help support them throughout their sentence and with preparing for reintegration.

Photo credit: Sameer Khan