Jamila Beesley

Jamila Beesley is a Legal Assistant in the New York Office of Sanford Heisler Sharp, a national law firm with offices in the District of Columbia, New York, California, Tennessee, Maryland, and Georgia. She graduated with departmental honors and magna cum laude from Brown University. Jamila was elected Phi Beta Kappa as a junior and was awarded the Academic Excellence in International and Public Affairs Prize.

At Brown, Jamila’s academic work and senior honors thesis interrogated intra-community caste discrimination in South Asian American diasporic spaces through a gendered lens. Her thesis was awarded three different prizes – the Department of American Studies Thesis Prize, the Ruth Simmons Thesis Prize in Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Center for Contemporary South Asia Thesis Prize in South Asian Studies. Throughout her time at Brown, Jamila served as the Lead Coordinator of Sexual Assault Peer Education (SAPE), a program that facilitates workshops on sexual, relationship, and gender-based harm prevention with a wide range of student organizations, athletic teams, and groups on campus.

Jamila has previously held internships at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Human Rights Watch, and the University of Miami School of Law. She also worked in her local communities at a Boston-based South Asian domestic violence organization and as a COVID-19 volunteer with the Rhode Island Medical Reserve Corps.

Jamila hopes to attend law school in the future.