Members & Staff

Migration Scholar Collaborative (MiSC) is a hub for scholars in the humanities and social sciences to present their work to journalists, lawmakers and thought leaders. We strive to decriminalize migration and open wider pathways to legal immigration in the United States.

Below is a complete list of our members and staff.

Our Members

Laura Briggs

Professor of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Laura Briggs is an expert on U.S. and international child welfare policy and on transnational and transracial adoption. Her research studies the relationship between reproductive politics, migrant justice, neoliberalism and the historical trajectory of U.S. imperialism. Briggs is also a leading scholar in rethinking the field and frameworks of transnational feminism.

Recent Publication: Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press, 2020)

Geraldo Cadava

Associate Professor of History, Northwestern University

Geraldo Cadava is a historian of the U.S. and Latin America. His work focuses on Latinos in the U.S. and the Mexico borderlands, Latino immigration to the United States, and American politics. He is working on a book about the friendship between William F. Buckley, Jr., a leading conservative intellectual, and E. Howard Hunt, one of the men who planned the Watergate break-in.

Recent Publication: The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of An American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump (HarperCollins Publishers, 2020).

Alicia Schmidt Camacho

Chair of Ethnicity, Race and Migration and Professor of American Studies, Yale University

Alicia S. Camacho’s scholarship examines migration, social movements, and cultural politics in North America. Her articles explore transnational labor organizing, gender violence, and femicide in Mexico, border governance, and migrant expressive culture. Her courses examine the histories of race making and the formation of transnational Latinx communities in North America.

Recent Publication: Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York University, 2008)

Maria Cristina Garcia

Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies, Cornell University

A 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Maria Cristina García studies refugees, immigrants, and exiles. Her books study the North American response to the Central American refugee crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, and the Cuban exodus to the U.S. after the Castro revolution. García’s interest in displaced and mobile populations has increasingly blurred the geographic borders of her work.

Recent Publication: The Refugee Challenge in Post-Cold War America (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Tanya Golash-Boza

Professor of Sociology, University of California, Merced

Tanya focuses on gaining a deep understanding of systems of oppression and exploitation. As a writer, speaker, and teacher, she tells stories of people and of systems to help people understand how racism and capitalism structure our lives and what we need to do to change this country and the world.

Recent Publication: Punishment Beyond the Deportee: The Collateral Consequences of Deportation (American Behavioral Scientist, 2019).

Adam Goodman

Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies & History, University of Illinois Chicago

Adam's research interests include migration history and police; Mexican American and Latinx history, border and borderlands history, and recent U.S., Mexican, and Central American history. His latest book traces the U.S. government’s systematic efforts to terrorize and expel noncitizens over the past 140 years.

Recent Publication: The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Carly Goodman

Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern American History, La Salle University

Carly is a historian, writer, and editor who taught courses on immigration and U.S., global, African American, and African history. She is a co-editor at Made By History at the Washington Post, where she edits commentary and analysis from the nation’s leading historians. She is currently working on a book on the contemporary immigration restrictionist movement launched by John Tanton.

Recent Publication: President Trump’s immigration suspension has nothing to do with coronavirus (Washington Post, 2020).

Torrie Hester

Associate Professor of History, Saint Louis University

Torrie is a U.S. historian interested in immigration, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, law and foreign policy. In her first book, Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy, Hester shows how the incremental creation of acceptable grounds for deportation reflected an agenda of racialized nation-building. She has published on more contemporary deportations in places such as the Washington Post and the Journal of American History.

Recent Publication: Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

Hidetaka Hirota

Associate Professor of English Studies, Sophia University.

Hidetaka Hirota is a historian of the United States with particular interests in immigration, race and ethnicity, law and policy, labor, and transnational history. His first book, Expelling the Poor, examines the origins of immigration restriction in the u.s., especially American deportation policy.

Recent Publication: Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Karl Jacoby

Allan Nevins Professor of American History, Columbia University

Karl Jacoby is a specialist in environmental, borderlands, and Native American history. He has devoted his career to understanding the ways in which the making of the U.S. intertwined with the unmaking of a variety of other societies– from Native American nations to the communities of northern Mexico– and the ecologies upon which they rested.

Recent Publication: The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016).

Kevin Kenny

Glucksman Professor of History, New York University

Kevin Kenny specializes in the history of immigration in the 19th-century United States. He is currently completing a book about the intersection of immigration policy and slavery from the American Revolution through Reconstruction. His first book, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, examines how traditions of Irish rural protest were transplanted into industrial America.

Recent Publication: Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Erika Lee

Regents Professor of History and Asian American Studies, University of Minnesota

Erika Lee’s scholarly specialties include migration, race, and ethnicity, xenophobia, immigation law and public police, Asian Americans, and transnational U.S. History. As the director of the Immigration history Research Center, Lee has helped pioneer new ways of merging immigration history with the digital humanities.

Recent Publication: America for Americans: A history of Xenophobia in the United States (Basic Books, 2019).

Julian Lim

Associate Professor of History, Arizona State University

Trained in history and law, Julian Lim focuses on immigration, borders, and race, and has taught in both history department and law school settings. She has published articles on race, immigration and refugee law, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Lim is currently working on her second book: an examination of U.S. territorial control and border expansions since the 1880s.

Recent Publication: Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Carl Lindskoog

Assistant Professor of History, Raritan Valley Community College

A historian of migration and empire, Carl Lindskoog teaches courses in US, African-American, and Modern Latin American history. His newest book asserts that systems designed for Haitian refugees in the 1970s laid the groundwork for the way immigrants are treated in the U.S. He is now in the process of writing a new history of the Sanctuary Movement, from Reagan to Trump.

Recent Publication: Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World's Largest Immigration Detention System (University of Florida Press, 2018).

Kelly Lytle Hernández

Professor & Thomas E. Lifka Chair of History, University of California, Los Angeles

Kelly Lytle Hernández is a professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is is a historian challenging long-held beliefs about the origins, ideology, and systemic evolution of America’s modern-day incarceration and immigrant detention practices.

Recent Publication: Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (Norton & Company, 2022).

Elliott Young

Professor of History, Lewis and Clark College

Elliott's work focuses on Latin America, transnational migration and borderlands history. In 2003, Young co-founded the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas, an annual event aimed at facilitating meaningful exchange between scholars in the U.S. and Latin America. He serves as an expert witness supporting migrants applying for asylum in the U.S.

Recent Publication: Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Maddalena Marinari

Associate Professor of History; Peace Studies; and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies

Maddalena Marinari teaches courses on 20th Century U.S. history, immigration history, American identity, and world history. She has published extensively on immigration restriction and immigrant mobilization. She seeks to empower students to look at U.S. history in a global perspective, think critically about who makes history, and grapple with how the past influences the present.

Recent Publication: Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization Against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882-1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Monica Muñoz Martinez

Associate Professor of History, University of Texas, Austin

Monica Muñoz Martínez is an award-winning author, educator, and public historian dedicated to developing solutions that address racial violence and injustice. Her research specializes in histories of racial violence, policing on the US-Mexico border, Latinx history, women and gender studies, public humanities, digital humanities, and restorative justice.

Recent Publication: The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Harvard University Press, 2018).

Ana Raquel Minian

Associate Professor of History, Stanford University

Ana Raquel Minian is an author whose work addresses the diversity of Latinx identities and the historical forces that have shaped social movements and led to changing attitudes, such as the economic and political realities that caused Mexican-Americans to stop seeing themselves in competition with immigrants and instead to identify with them and support their rights.

Recent Publication: Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018).

Natalia Molina

Distinguished Professor of American Studies, University of Southern California

Natalia is the author of two award-winning books, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts and Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940. Her work examines the interconnectedness of racial and ethnic communities through "racial scripts," or practices, customs, policies and laws that are directed at one group and are readily available and easily applied to other groups.

Recent Publication: Placemaking at the Nayarit (University of California Press, 2022).

Mae Ngai

Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, Columbia University

Mae is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. She is the author of the award-winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004) and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (2010). Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, among others.

Recent Publication: Racism Has Always Been Part of the Asian American Experience (The Atlantic, 2021).

A. Naomi Paik

Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Naomi is the author of Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps Since World War II. She is the HRI-Mellon fellow in Legal Humanities and the Center for Advanced Study’s Resident Associate, organizing a series of events on abolition. Her research interests include U.S. imperialism and militarism; sociocultural approaches to legal studies; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration. She is currently working on a manuscript on the most capacious meaning of “sanctuary for all” and developing another on military outsourcing.

Recent Publication: Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary (University of California Press, 2020).

Stephen Pitti

Professor of History and of American Studies, Yale University

Pitti is the Founding Director of Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and the Associate Head of Ezra Stiles College. He is the author of The Devil in Silicon Valley: Race, Mexican Americans, and Northern California (2003), American Latinos and the Making of the United States (2012), and articles on Latinx history and historiography. He also directs the Latina/o History Project, which explores ethnic Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and other Latino histories in the U.S., their links and divisions, diversity, cultures, and politics.

Upcoming Publication: The World of César Chávez (Yale University Press).

Alex Sager

Associate Professor of Philosophy and University Studies

Alex is a philosophy professor whose research mainly focuses on the ethics and possibilities of change regarding migration and movement. An advocate for open borders, Sager has written a variety of pieces in different mediums pushing forward this public philosophy of compassion over control. He is the founder of the Oregon High School Ethics Bowl which he organizes with his colleagues in the Philosophy Department that brings together dozens of teachers, PSU students, and community members.

Recent Publication: Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020).

Josefina Saldaña

Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University

Josefina's areas of research include Latin American and Latinx Studies, Indigenous Studies, colonization, migration, and comparative race in the Americas, with an emphasis on Central America and Mexico. She provides expert witness testimony for asylum seekers regarding MS 13 and Barrio 18 gang culture, gendered violence against women in Central America (both domestic and gang related), and discrimination based on ethnicity and race.

Recent Publication: "The Violence of Citizenship in the Making of Refugees: The U.S. and Central America," (in Social Text, Fall 2019) and Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States (Duke University Press, 2016).

Lucy Salyer

Professor of History, University of New Hampshire

Lucy's research focuses on the history of immigration and citizenship policies in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (1995) and numerous articles. She is able to speak to the media about immigration history, immigration and citizenship policies, birthright citizenship controversy, the Chinese exclusion act, Japanese American internment, and Irish American history.

Recent Publication: Under the Starry Flag: How a Band of Irish Americans Joined the Fenian Revolt and Sparked a Crisis in Citizenship (Harvard University Press, 2018).

Yael Schacher

Advocate, Refugees International

Yael is senior U.S. advocate at Refugees International, where she focuses on asylum, refugee admissions, temporary protected status, and humanitarian visas. Prior to that, she researched the relationship between immigration and refugee policy for her forthcoming book on the history of asylum in the U.S. since the late 19th century. Most recently, Yael was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, where she combined historical research on asylum advocacy.

Recent Publication: "'I Hate to Human Beings Pushed Around By Fate and By Law: Edith Lowenstein's Asylum Advocacy in the 1950s and 1960s," Journal of American Ethnic History special issue, "New Scholarship on Refugees and Asylum" (2020).

Lynn Stephen

Philip H. Knight Chair & Professor of Anthropology, University of Oregon

Lynn's work centers on immigration, asylum and gendered asylum in the U.S., gendered violence, transborder communities, Indigenous immigrants from Latin America, Mexico, and Central America, and Latino community histories in the Northwest. Her current research includes a collaborative project with 11 community-based organizations in Oregon exploring the impact of COVID-19 on farmworker families.

Recent publication: Stories that Make History: Remembering Mexico through Elena Poniatowska’s Crónicas (Duke University Press, 2021).

Juliet Stumpf

Robert E. Jones Professor of Advocacy and Ethics, Lewis & Clark Law School

Juliet is a scholar of "crimmigration law," the intersection of immigration and criminal law. Her current research explores innovation in immigration law, and seeks to illuminate the study of immigration law with interdisciplinary insights. Stumpf is also a co-founder of CINETS, a transnational, interdisciplinary network of crimmigration scholars. She sits on the Advisory Group of Oxford University’s academic blog Border Criminologies and the Board of Directors of the Innovation Law Lab.

Recent Publication: Follow the Money: Capital Controls as Migrant Controls (Jotwell, 2021).

Evan Taparata

Postdoctoral Fellow of Global American Studies at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University

Evan's research interests include migration, belonging, law, and empire in the 19th and 20th century U.S. He is the co-founder of the digital collective behind AbusablePast.org and has contributed to many digital public history projects, including the Humanities Action Lab’s “States of Incarceration” initiative and the #ImmigrationSyllabus. He is currently at work on his book manuscript, State of Refuge: The Origins of Refugee Law and Policy in the U.S.

Recent Publication: “‘Refugees as You Call Them:’ The Politics of Refugee Recognition in the Nineteenth Century United States,” (Journal of American Ethnic History, 2019).

Rachel Ida Buff

Professor of History, Coordinator of the Comparative Ethnic Studies, and Director of the Cultures and Communities Program, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Rachel is a writer and practicing historian. She is author of Against the Deportation Terror: Organizing for Immigrant Rights in the Twentieth Century (Temple UP, 2017) and Immigration and the Political Economy of Home (UC Press, 1998), and the editor of Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship (NYU Press, 2008). Rachel organizes with Never Again Action- Wisconsin and Voces de la Frontera.

Recent Publication: A is for Asylum Seeker: Words for People on the Move/A de Asilo: Palabras para Personas en Movimiento (Fordham, 2020).

Catherine Sue Ramírez

Chair & Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Catherine is a scholar, writer, teacher, mentor, and program-builder. Her areas of expertise include Latinx literary, cultural, visual, and performance studies; Mexican American history; migration and citizenship studies; comparative ethnic studies; feminist and gender studies; and speculative fiction and Latinxfuturism.

Recent Publication Assimilation: An Alternative History (California, 2020); The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke, 2009).

Tina Shull

Assistant Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Tina Shull (she/her) is a public historian of race, empire, immigration enforcement, and climate migration in the modern US and the World. She holds a PhD in History from UC Irvine, a Master’s in Humanities and Social Thought from NYU, and a BA in History from UCLA. Her forthcoming book from UNC Press, Detention Empire, explores the rise of migrant detention in the early 1980s as a form counter-insurgency.

Recent Publication: Detention Empire: Reagan's Total War on Immigrants and the Seeds of Resistance.

Josh Kun

Chair & Professor of Cross-Cultural Communication, University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism

Josh Kun is an author and editor of many books and anthologies, and the curator of numerous art, music and public humanities projects. His research and practice focus on the arts, music and politics of cultural connection, with an emphasis on archives, global migration and Los Angeles.

Recent Publication: The Autograph Book of L.A.: Improvements on the Page of the City (Angel City Press, 2019).

Brenden Rensink

Associate Professor of History, Brigham Young University

Brenden Rensink his a historian interested in the North American West, transnational borderlands, Indigenous peoples, comparative genocide, public history, and western wilderness and environment. He is Associate Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University. He is the producer of the Writing Westward Podcast.

Recent Publication: Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands (Texas A&M University Press, 2017).

Ivón Padilla Rodríguez

Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Illinois at Chicago

Ivón is the daughter of formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants. Her research is rooted in her longstanding commitments to immigrant communities. Her work uncovers the origins of undocumented youth labor trafficking, the “school-to-deportation” pipeline, and migrant child detention in the twentieth century.

Upcoming Publication (Chapter in Modern Frontiers): A Violation of the Most Elementary Human Rights of Children: The Rise of Migrant Youth Detention and Family Separation in the American West (University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

César García Hernández

Gregory Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties & Professor of Law, The Ohio State University

César is a scholar of criminal and immigration law. He is the author of Crimmigration Law and publishes the blog crimmigration.com. His scholarly articles about the right to counsel for migrants in the criminal justice system, immigration imprisonment, and race-based immigration policing have appeared in the California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, BYU Law Review, Maryland Law Review, and Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, among others. He is of counsel to García & García Attorneys at Law, P.L.L.C.

Upcoming Publication: In Defense of the Criminal Alien (The New Press, 2023).

Stephanie DeGooyer

Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Stephanie's research examines intersections between law and literature, with interests in immigration, migration, human rights and humanitarianism, and history of disease and global health. She is currently working on two projects: Asylum Nation: Refugees and the Founding of America, which traces the colonial history of legal concepts such as “asylum” and “refugees” in British common law and early American legal history, and a book project on the history and social function of unidentified bodily remains.

Recent Publication: Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization (JHUP, 2022)

Randa Tawil

Assistant Professor of Women & Gender Studies, Texas Christian University

Randa studies the histories of migration, mobility, sexuality, and Arab/Middle Eastern American studies. She contributes pieces to the Washington Post and Open Democracy on issues concerning migration and US history. She is currently working on her manuscript, Race in Transit: Mobilities between Greater Syria and the United States, 1881-1945, which follows the lives of migrants and reveals mobility itself as a site where race, gender, and sexuality are generated, deployed, and internalized.

Recent Publication: A "Flying Carpet to Doom": Retracing Gender and Orientalism through the Transnational Journeys of a Syrian Migrant Woman, 1912–1949 (University of Nebraska Press, 2022)

Eladio B. Bobadilla

Assistant Professor of History, University of Kentucky

Eladio's research and teaching interests include U.S. history, Latinx history, ethnic and immigration, capitalism, labor and working-class history, radicalism, and extremism. In May 2019, he completed his dissertation at Duke University, titled “‘One People without Borders’: The Lost Roots of the Immigrants’ Rights Movement, 1954-2006,” which won the Herbert G. Gutman Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association. His first book, based on his dissertation and tentatively titled Without Border: The Roots and Consequences of the Immigrants’ Rights Movement, will be published by the University of Illinois Press as part of the Working Class in American History series.

Austin Kocher

Assistant Research Professor, Newhouse School of Communication & Transactional Research Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University

Austin is a scholar and researcher based at TRAC, a research institute in Syracuse University that uses Freedom of Information Act requests to study the federal government. Kocher’s current research at TRAC includes mapping and analyzing large federal datasets related to immigration detention, enforcement, and deportation, the immigration court system, and trends within the federal criminal and civil courts.

Recent Publication: Migrant Protection Protocols and the Death of Asylum (University of Texas Press, 2021)

Jessica Ordaz

Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

Jessica's research and teaching interests include Chicanx/Latinx history, US/Mexico border studies, radical social movements, migration and migrant politics, labor history, the carceral state, the detention and deportation regime, and food justice Her upcoming project will explore the multifaceted history of veganism and plant-based foods throughout the Americas, focusing on colonization, food politics, and social justice. It will illuminate the wider and transnational history of Latinx veganism and how communities of color have engaged with questions of animal, human, and plant relations for centuries.

Recent Publication: The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity (UNC Press, 2021)

Michele Waslin

Assistant Director, Immigration History Research Institute, University of Minnesota

Michele is a political scientist specializing in immigration law and policy. For years, she worked as a policy analyst in Washington, DC, wrote on immigration issues, and appeared regularly in English- and Spanish-language press. Her research and teaching interests include executive authority, federalism, enforcement, and immigrant athletes. She is currently co-authoring a book on Central American women and gender-based asylum.

Recent publication: "Immigrants' Pivotal Role in TeamUSA's Olympic Success." The Hill, August 9, 2021.

Jennifer Suchland

Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Ohio State University

Jennifer's research focus is on transnational and colonial relations of power in the context of “human rights.” She held a 2020 ACLS/Mellon Foundation Scholars & Society fellowship where she collaborated with the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center museum and the Ohio Justice and Policy Center on projects related to abolition and public education. She is the author of Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking and is currently completing a book entitled Debts of Analogy: Accounting for Modern Day Slavery.

Recent Publication: "What’s Wrong with the US Federal Response to “Sex Trafficking”?" The Gender Policy Report, January 11, 2023.