Vanessa Braganza is a rising 3L at Columbia Law School, where she focuses on immigration, race and gender discrimination, and administrative law issues. Last summer, she interned at the Law Office of Max Rodriguez PLLC where she worked on complex Title VII workplace harassment, retaliation, continuing violations doctrine, and defamation issues.

Vanessa also completed her PhD in English literature at Harvard and is a public-facing literary historian and author who specializes in the hidden and neglected achievements of historical women. Her first book, The Secret Seekers: A Book Detective’s Quest to Crack the Coded Messages of History’s Most Brilliant Women tells the true stories of women who were cryptographers in the time of Shakespeare, and is forthcoming from HarperCollins in February 2027.