Jaden Oates

Jaden Oates is a first-year PhD student in Black Studies and History at Yale University and a Graduate Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM). Jaden plans to study how the advent of mass incarceration in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement impacted Black life in urban spaces in the North. Struck by the juxtaposition of the Movement’s victories with the unsettling realities of policing and urban poverty, he wants to explore the criminalization of Black communities in the late twentieth century and its effects on Black life. 

Jaden earned a B.A. in History and Political Science with a minor in Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2026 as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. His Honors thesis, “Contesting The Welfare Queen: The Campaign For Media Fairness On Welfare In 1995,” was an investigation into the role of the welfare queen stereotype in contributing to the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.

Jaden is a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Incorporated.

Interests: Black Liberation Movements; Welfare Rights Organizing; Cultural Hegemony; Policing; Politics; Racial Studies; Intersectionality; Urban Studies.