Els de Graauw / Conference Organizer Els de Graauw is an Associate Professor at Baruch College, with an appointment in the Department of Political Science and teaching responsibilities also in the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs; she is also the Acting Director of the MA Program in International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She specializes in American politics, immigration, civil society organizations, (sub)urban politics, and public policy, with a focus on building institutional capacity for immigrant integration and representation at the local and state levels. She is the author of Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco (Cornell University Press, 2016), co-winner of the best book award of the Migration and Citizenship of the American Political Science Association. Her research also appears in Politics, Groups, and Identities, Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, WorkingUSA, Politics & Society, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Political Science, Daedalus, and various edited volumes. de Graauw earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley,; she also holds a M.A. degree in American Studies from Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Lamis Abdelaaty / Presenter Lamis Abdelaaty is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University. Her research interests include international relations, human rights and humanitarianism, and asylum and migration. She is currently completing a book manuscript that asks why countries open their borders to some refugees while blocking others, and why a number of countries have given the United Nations control of asylum procedures and refugee camps on their territory. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, and others. She holds a doctoral degree in politics from Princeton University.
Sofya Aptekar / Presenter Sofya Aptekar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, studying immigration, public space, race, and culture. She has written a book on naturalization, and her articles have appeared in City & Community, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociological Forum, Social Problems, Ethnicities, Citizenship Studies, and other journals. Together with Amy Hsin, she is currently conducting a W.T. Grant Foundation-sponsored project investigating trajectories of undocumented students at CUNY.
Charlotte Brooks / Presenter Charlotte Brooks, a Professor of History at Baruch College, CUNY, is the author most recently of Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years (University of Chicago Press, 2015), a comparative study of Chinese American political activism in New York and San Francisco between World War Two and the late 1960s. In 2017, she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers to complete her third book, Immigrants from America: The Chinese American Second Generation in China, 1900-1949, which explores the lives of the thousands of Chinese American citizens who immigrated to China from the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Her first book, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (University of Chicago Press, 2009), received an honorable mention for the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Award. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, Journal of American Ethnic History, and Pacific Historical Review.
Hana E. Brown / Presenter Hana E. Brown is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University. Brown’s scholarship examines the political origins and consequences of social inequality with a particular focus on immigration and race relations. Her recent work has appeared in such journals as the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Social Problems. Her various research projects have been supported by the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Science Foundation and have received awards from multiple sections of the American Sociological Association. She received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. During the 2015-2016 academic year, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for African-American Research at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Jason P. Casellas / Presenter Jason P. Casellas is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston. He specializes in American politics, with specific research and teaching interests in Latino politics, legislative politics, and state and local politics. He is the author of Latino Representation in State Houses and Congress (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Princeton Fellowship, an American Political Science Association Fellowship, a Ford Motor Company Fellowship, the Samuel DuBois CookPostdoctoral Fellowship at Duke University, and a United States Studies Centre Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Sydney (Australia). In 2011, he was awarded a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. He is a member of the Texas Advisory Committee of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. His work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, Aztlán: Journal of Chicano Studies, and other peer-reviewed journals.
Justin Gest / Keynote Speaker Justin Gest is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. He is the author of Apart: Alienated and Engaged Muslims in the West (Oxford University Press, 2010), The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2016), and he will soon publish Crossroads: Comparative Immigration Regimes in a World of Demographic Change (Cambridge University Press, 2018). His articles have appeared in journals including Comparative Political Studies, Ethnic and Migration Studies, and International Migration Review. Gest has also provided analysis for numerous news organizations including the BBC, CNN, The Guardian, Politico, Reuters, and The Washington Post.
Sara W. Goodman / Presenter Sara Wallace Goodman is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, where she is also an affiliate of the Centers for Research on International Migration (CRIM) and for the Study of Democracy (CSD). Her research examines democratic inclusion and the shaping of political identity through citizenship, immigrant integration, and education policy. She is the author of Immigration and Membership Politics in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2014), awarded the Best Book Award by the European Politics and Society Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). Her research has also been published in Comparative Political Studies, World Politics, West European Politics, Political Studies, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. She is currently co-president of APSA's Section on Migration and Citizenship.
Lyosha Gorshkov / Presenter Lyosha Gorshkov is an LGBTIQ rights activist and a co-president of RUSA LGBT, a community-based advocacy and support group based in New York City. RUSA LGBT serves and advocates for social justice and human rights of Russian-speaking LGBTQ refugees. Lyosha holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Perm University in Russia. His research in Russia was focused on queer identity.
Miranda C. Hallett / Presenter Miranda Cady Hallett is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Dayton. She is a legal anthropologist who has conducted fieldwork in El Salvador since 1998 and with Salvadoran immigrant communities in the United States since 2004. Her multidisciplinary expertise lies at the intersection of Latin American studies, migration studies and border theory, law and society, and labor studies. Her recent work focuses on mass detention and deportation as components of the regime of mass incarceration in the contemporary United States, exploring how these systems uphold mechanisms of labor exploitation and intersectional oppression. Hallett is also an engaged public anthropologist with a commitment to human rights and social justice movements. Amy Hsin / Presenter Amy Hsin is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College, CUNY, studying education, immigration and race/ethnicity. Her articles have appeared in Demography, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Economics of Education Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and other journals. Together with Sofya Aptekar, she is currently conducting a W.T. Grant Foundation-sponsored project investigating trajectories of undocumented students at CUNY.
Jennifer Jones / Presenter Jennifer Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Jones completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Ohio State University in the Department of Sociology as a Social and Behavioral Sciences Diversity Fellow, and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Specializing in race and ethnicity, immigration, political sociology, and Latin America and the Caribbean, Jones’ recent work can be found in such journals as Contexts, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Latino Studies. Jones is completing her first book manuscript entitled: The Browning of the New South: Race, Immigration, and Minority Linked Fate, forthcoming with University of Chicago Press.
Phil Kasinitz / Moderator & Discussant Philip Kasinitz is Presidential Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, where he chaired the doctoral program in Sociology from 2001 to 2018. His co-authored book Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age received the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award and the Eastern Sociological Society’s Mira Komarovsky Book Award in 2010. His other recent works include Growing Up Muslim in Europe and the United Sates, co-edited with Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Global Cities, Local Streets, with Sharon Zukin, and Xiangming Chen, The Urban Ethnography Reader, edited with Mitchell Duneier and Alexandra Murphy, and Caribbean New York, which received theThomas Znaniecki Award from the American Sociological Association. Kasinitz served as the President of the Eastern Sociological Society in 2007-2008 and was awarded the Society’s “Merit” Award for career contributions in 2015. He is a member of the historical advisory committee for the Ellis Island-Statue of Liberty Museum and a consultant to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Prior to coming to CUNY, Kasinitz taught at Williams College, he has held visiting appointments at Princeton, the University of Amsterdam and the Technical University of Berlin, and he has been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Liege. René Kreichauf / Presenter René Kreichauf is a Ph.D. student at the Brussels Graduate School for Urban Research (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and at the Graduate School of North American Studies (Freie Universität Berlin). In 2018, he is visiting the Global Urban Studies program at Rutgers University-Newark. His Ph.D. project investigates the arrival and integration of refugees and asylum seekers in European and North American cities. His publication and research activities further focus on urban transformation trends, declining cities, small town studies, social-spatial inequalities, and urban ethnic politics. Kreichauf received the 2017 IMISCOE Rinus Penninx Best Paper Award for his work on refugee accommodation practices in European cities.
Fanny Lauby / Presenter Fanny Lauby is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at William Paterson University. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the CUNY Graduate Center as well as a Ph.D. in American Studies from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Prior to joining the faculty at William Paterson, she taught at Baruch College, CUNY, and at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Lauby’s research focuses on the experiences and the political mobilization of immigrant youths in the United States.
Sonia Lin / Presenter Sonia Lin is the General Counsel and Policy Director at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA), where she leads the office’s policy work and legal initiatives on behalf of immigrant communities in New York City. Prior to joining MOIA, she taught law students and litigated immigrant rights cases at Cardozo Law School’s Immigration Justice Clinic. She has previously worked as a workers rights attorney and started her career as an accredited representative at the Legal Aid Society’s Immigration Law Unit. Lin graduated with honors from New York University School of Law, where she was a Root Tilden Kern scholar, and Yale College. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Denny Chin in the Southern District of New York.
Theo Majka / Presenter Theo Majka is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Dayton. He teaches and conducts research on immigrant and refugee integration, as well as supporting local organizing around immigrants’ rights. His and Jamie Longazel’s article on Welcome Dayton, “Becoming Welcoming: Organizational Collaboration and Immigrant Integration in Dayton, Ohio,” was published in the journal Public Integrity. He was also a participant in the “community conversations” that resulted in the Welcome Dayton: Immigrant Friendly City initiative in 2011 and is currently a member of the Welcome Dayton Committee.
John H. Mollenkopf / Moderator & Discussant John H. Mollenkopf is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology and Director of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has authored or edited eighteen books on the role of immigration, race, and ethnicity in urban America, including a co-edited volume with Manuel Pastor, Unsettled in America: Metropolitan Context, Local Leadership, and Immigrant Integration (Cornell University Press, 2016). Other works on immigrant integration include Bringing Outsiders In: Transatlantic Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation (co-edited with Jennifer Hochschild, Cornell University Press, 2009) and a prize-winning study of educational attainment, labor market outcomes, and political and civic involvement among second-generation immigrant and native minority young adults in metropolitan New York, Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age (with Philip Kasinitz, Mary Waters, and Jennifer Holdaway, Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2008). He has been a visiting scholar at Sciences Po in Paris and the University of Amsterdam, a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, and a Fellow the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Prior to joining The Graduate Center, he directed the Economic Development Division of the New York City Department of City Planning and taught public management and urban studies at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard and B.A. from Carleton College.
David Monda / Presenter David Monda is a Ph.D. candidate (2019) in Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests include feminist construction of power in international relations, conflict resolution in transitioning societies, securitization of refugee policy, and international humanitarian law. He collaboratively looks to expand research in these areas at the African Research Group at the Graduate Center. His undergraduate and graduate degrees are in International Relations from Alliant International University in San Diego. His specialization was in International Economics and Foreign Policy for his MA degree. Monda is also an instructor of Political Science at the Guttman Community College, CUNY. He has taught a range of Political Science, International Relations, and Public Administration courses in the United States, Brazil, South Africa, and Kenya. He regularly provides media contributions on a range of issues concerning international affairs on Voice of America, Deutsche-Welle, Citizen, and Nation Television.
Daniel Naujoks / Moderator Daniel Naujoks teaches international development, public policy, migration and refugee studies at Columbia University and at The New School. He has published widely on the effects of migration and citizenship on social, economic and political development, migrants’ rights, ethnic identity and the role and genesis of public, diaspora and citizenship policies, as well as on refugees and displacement, including his book Migration, Citizenship, and Development: Diasporic Membership Policies and Overseas Indians in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2013). His recent research focuses on migration governance and public policy design in the light of migration and displacement. In addition, Naujoks regularly advises United Nations agencies and international organizations—including UNDP, IOM, World Bank, ILO, UN-DESA, OECD, UNESCWA, and UNICEF—on issues of migration, diaspora engagement, human rights, displacement, and development. Naujoks currently serves as chair-elect of the International Studies Association’s Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies section.
Tanzilya Oren / Presenter Tanzilya Oren is a Ph.D. student at Fordham University School of Social Service. Her research interests are in the fields of refugee and immigration policies, gender violence, and international social work. Before starting her doctoral studies, she was an immigrant services practitioner for over seven years, working for NYS Department of Labor and ESU New Immigrant Center. She emigrated from Uzbekistan, after a career in community development there.
Kavita Pawria-Sanchez / Presenter Kavita Pawria-Sanchez is Assistant Commissioner at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA) and oversees MOIA’s interagency initiatives to advance immigrant inclusion across city government. She started at the Mayor’s Office as General Counsel in August 2013. Prior to MOIA, she served for five years as Executive Director of the Office of Refugee and Immigrant Affairs at NYC’s social service agency where she spearheaded policies and programmatic strategies to meet civil rights mandates for over 1 million immigrant New Yorkers. Prior to making the leap to government, Pawria-Sanchez was immersed in legal, policy, and community organizing work with diverse immigrant-based groups in New York City, such as DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving). She has a B.S. in Public Policy from Cornell University and earned a J.D. focusing on Human Rights Law in 2003 from the City University of New York School of Law.
Martin Petzke / Presenter Martin Petzke received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, in 2012. He is currently a lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of Lucerne, Switzerland, and a visiting scholar at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. In his research, he is interested in the ways quantification and social-scientific expertise intervene in and shape practice fields. He has published extensively on the role of missionary statistics in evangelical global missions since the 19th century. His current project investigates the effects of using quantitative indicators of immigrant integration in the public administration of integration services in Germany.
Daniele Pila / Presenter Daniela Pila is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research areas are immigration, race and ethnicity, Asian and Asian Americans, and immigrant young adults. She is currently working on her dissertation, which explores how legal status affects ethnic identity formation in Filipino immigrant young adults in the Greater New York metropolitan area. When not working on dismantling institutional discrimination, Daniela enjoys photography, traveling, learning languages, and spending time with her husband and their furchild, Luna.
Aldemaro Romero Jr. / Dean of the Weissman School Aldemaro Romero Jr. is a scholar and a higher education administrator. He received his bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of Barcelona, Spain, and his Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Miami, Florida. He has published nearly 900 pieces including more than 20 books and monographs and hundreds of articles in both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed publications. His academic interests range from environmental and evolutionary biology to marine biology to history and philosophy of science and science communication. He has also been involved in mass communication and art productions and has been awarded numerous grants and prizes for his research, teaching, and science communication work. His experiences in academia includes, but is not limited to, Director and Associate Professor of the Environmental Studies Program at Macalester College, MN (1998-2003), Chair and Professor of the Department of Biological Sciences at Arkansas State University (2003-2009), Dean and Professor of the College of Arts and Sciences at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (2009-2014), and Dean and Professor of the George and Mildred Weissman School of Arts & Sciences at Baruch College-CUNY (2016-present).
Liza G. Steele / Presenter Liza G. Steele is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies at the State University of New York (SUNY), Purchase. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University in 2013 and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Columbia University. Currently, she researches attitudes towards income inequality and social welfare policies (preferences for redistribution). This ongoing work on policy preferences is divided into two lines of research: (1) diversity and migration, and (2) wealth, elites, and social mobility. More generally, her research focuses on how social stratification and economic inequality affect the development of beliefs, attitudes, and values through the lens of cross-national comparison. Her previous research includes in-depth studies of Brazil and China. She uses both quantitative and qualitative methods in her research, and she has a working knowledge of French, Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Jackie Vimo / Presenter Jackie Vimo is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the New School for Social Research who will defend a dissertation this semester on state-level immigrant rights movements in the United States since 1994. She has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at Hunter College, CUNY, and the New School University. Vimo has a B.A. in Political Science from Barnard College, Columbia University and a M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She is also currently a Policy Analyst for the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), a national organization that engages in policy analysis, litigation, education, and advocacy to defend and advance the rights and opportunities of low-income immigrants and their families. Vimo has been working for almost two decades on a broad range of public policy issues in California, New York, and Argentina, where her family is from and still lives. Prior to her current position, Vimo was the Director of Advocacy at the New York Immigration Coalition, a statewide umbrella organization for organizations working with immigrants in New York State.
Sophia J. Wallace / Presenter Sophia Jordán Wallace is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington. She received her B.A. from UC San Diego and her Ph.D. from Cornell University. She specializes in Latino politics, representation, social movements, and immigration politics and policy. During the 2015-2016 academic year, she was a Ford Foundation Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, Politics, Groups, & Identities,American Politics Research, Social Science Quarterly, and Political Science Quarterly. She is a co-founder and co-organizer of SPIRE, Symposium on the Politics of Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity, which is an annual conference of race, ethnicity, and politics scholars. She is also the Field Director for Latino Politics and Immigration at WISIR (Washington Institute for the Study of Inequality & Race).
This conference is made possible with generous support from the Baruch College Weissman School of Arts and Sciences.