Kristine Guillaume is the daughter of Haitian and Chinese immigrants. She was raised in Queens, New York City where her parents instilled in her the values of education and engaging meaningfully with communities near and far. Growing up, Kristine developed a passion for storytelling—particularly the stories of marginalized people in society—that has motivated her paths in the fields of academia and journalism.
Kristine graduated from Harvard College in 2020 with a degree in history and literature and African American Studies. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, she pursued independent research on the rise of mass incarceration in the United States through the study of Black prison writing. Her undergraduate honors thesis focused on the prison writings of Angela Davis and George Jackson, which examined how their respective periods of incarceration shaped their visions of Black liberation in the 1970s. During her time at Harvard, Kristine was a reporter for The Harvard Crimson and became the paper’s first Black woman president in 2019. She has also interned at The Atlantic and CBS Evening News.
Kristine continued her studies in African American literature and history at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She completed a master’s degree in English and American Studies (2021) and another in intellectual history (2022). Her postgraduate work, together with her undergraduate research, laid the foundation for research she is currently pursuing at Yale University, where she is doing a PhD in African American Studies and English. Kristine’s research interests are in 20th and 21st century African American literature with a focus on Black prison writing, Black feminist theory, and print culture. Her research is grounded in questions about how prison writing across literary forms and genres might provide crucial insight into how to remake conceptions of freedom, justice, and belonging. Furthermore, Kristine’s interests in Black print culture and background as a journalist have informed how her research aims to examine the material constraints around prison writing—namely surveillance, censorship, and access to publishing—especially through a consideration of prison newspapers and periodicals. At Yale, Kristine is also a research fellow for the Black Bibliography Project and volunteers with the Yale Prison Education Initiative.
