Dr. Felicia A. Henry, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at American University, is an artivist-scholar whose research expertise includes race, ethnicity, gender, class, carceral studies, arts-based activism, and disasters and the environment. She received her PhD from the University of Delaware. Her dissertation, “I Knew It Was Covid; I Knew I Was on Probation”: The Impact of the Carceral State on Black Women’s Disaster Experiences,” used COVID-19 as the context to explore the constraints of criminal legal involvement for Black women under community supervision. Felicia's work also broadly studies the intersection of disasters and criminal legal involvement to position criminal legal system involvement as a contributor to social vulnerability and promote policies for criminal legal system actors to improve outcomes for justice-involved populations during disasters.

She is the recipient of the George Herbert Ryden Prize in the Social Sciences for outstanding dissertation, a Bill Anderson Fund Fellow, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Law and Society Dissertation Grant Awardee, Recipient of the Unidel Award in Sociology & Criminal Justice, the University Unidel Distinguished Graduate Scholar Award, and the Corlett Nagel Family Disaster Research Center Enrichment Fund Award. She also received the 2021 Natural Hazards Center Graduate Student Paper award. Her work has been funded by the University of Delaware and Arnold Ventures Foundation and published in criminology, psychology, and environment journals, such as Social Sciences and Humanities Open, Critical Criminology, Corrections: Policy, Practice, and Research, Environmental Justice, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, and Journal of Community Psychology. She has also published on public-facing platforms such as WHYY and Medium. Felicia is also the Founder of Behind the Walls, Between the Lines (BTWBTL), a movement to deepen the awareness of the legacy of racial inequity in America, particularly within the carceral control, and inspire activism aimed at its dismantlement, and B(L)K/WMN, a space dedicated to and for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other creatives of Color.

A Licensed Social Worker (LMSW), Felicia received her Master of Social Work degree from the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.