Catherine S. Ramírez will spend the year working on two related projects: Assimilation: An Alternative History and Denizenship or Democracy? By excavating the history of the concept of assimilation in the United States, Assimilation offers a broader theory of assimilation, one that reckons with legacies of settler colonialism, slavery, and an immigration apparatus that ranks mobile subjects. A policy-oriented project, Denizenship or Democracy? confronts the problem of denizenship. Denizens are people who are present in the nation-state, but who are not recognized as full or legitimate members of society. By comparing integration policies in migrant-receiving countries, Ramírez hopes to work toward more meaningful immigrant integration and, by extension, more egalitarian democracies.  

An associate professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Ramírez is a scholar of migration, citizenship, and race. As director of UC Santa Cruz’s Research Center for the Americas, she was the principal investigator of Non-citizenship, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture. She is the author of The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009) and several essays on race, gender, and science fiction. For more information, visit her website: https://catherinesramirez.sites.ucsc.edu/