This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Sarah J. Mahler | |
---|---|
Born | |
Occupation(s) | Author, cultural anthropologist |
Known for | Books, cultural anthropology, expert on immigration and transnational migration issues |
Sarah J. Mahler (born 1959) [1] is an American author and cultural anthropologist. She was part of a group of anthropologists attempting to change migration studies to a more comprehensive way to understand how migrants crossing international borders remain tied to their homelands and how cultural practices and identities reflect influences from past and present contexts, called "transnational migration."
Sarah J. Mahler was born in York, Pennsylvania but spent most of her formative years in rural upstate New York in the western Catskill Mountains. She earned a bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts from Amherst College in 1982, a year later than her graduating class because after her sophomore year, she took a year leave, moved to Colombia, and immersed herself in a different culture and language.
Upon graduating, she worked in Manhattan for several years before continuing her education at Columbia University, earning a master's degree in Anthropology in 1989, and a Ph.D. in 1992. While in school and living predominantly in Latin American neighborhoods in New York City, she taught English as a second language for free, and became trained in immigration law. During those years she also worked with refugees fleeing violent wars in Central America.
After graduation, Mahler taught at the University of Vermont from 1992 to 1997 in the Anthropology department, and Florida International University from 1997, where she continues to teach courses in the interdisciplinary department of Global and Sociocultural Studies. [2] Her academic expertise is in cultural anthropology and international migration from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States. She joined a group of anthropologists and other scholars seeking to shift migration studies from just examining immigrants’ lives in their new country to a more comprehensive approach called transnational migration which researches how people who migrate across international borders nonetheless retain ties to their homelands, and how their cultural practices and identities reflect influence from previous and present contexts. Mahler’s contributions to this paradigm shift in migration studies have focused on how migrants’ gender relations typically shift, even for family members who themselves do not migrate.
In 2004, Mahler served as director of her department’s graduate studies program and in that year she oversaw a major shift in the graduate curriculum. In 2005 she was promoted to Director of the Center for Transnational and Comparative Studies at Florida International University. She served in that capacity in charge of numerous international study programs until 2008 when the center was closed for budgetary reasons. She then embarked on a major shift in her research, returning to an early passion for how people learn the culture that she had wanted to pursue since her daughter Sophia was born.
Since 2008 she has dedicated herself wholly to studying the wide-ranging interdisciplinary literature on the brain and how infants and children learn in general, and how they learn culture in particular. The results of this research are being published (see below).
As Central Americans’ story had not been told during the very difficult years of civil wars in the 1980s and early 1990s, Mahler decided to focus her dissertation on highlighting their plight; this was eventually published in two books. The first, American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins (Princeton 1995) was reviewed by The New York Times, has been used by scores of faculty teaching courses on area studies, and has helped a train a generation of new researchers on immigration. It remains an academic best seller despite being published almost two decades ago.
In 1994, she was awarded a prestigious research fellowship at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, one of the country’s premier social science fellowships. During her residency, Mahler finished American Dreaming and wrote her second book, Salvadorans in Suburbia: Symbiosis and Conflict.
Due to her work with immigrants and refugees, in 1996 she was honored by the Central American Refugee Center for years of advocacy in defense of human rights.
In 2011, Mahler was awarded the first Provost Award for Graduate Student Mentorship conferred by FIU’s Graduate School.
Mahler's next book, Culture as Comfort: The Many Things You Already Know [but might not realize] About Culture, was due to be published by Pearson Education in the summer of 2012. The book is the first step in a larger project aimed at shifting people’s everyday understandings of culture toward focusing on how creative and positive we can be culturally, instead of divisive and destructive.
With her husband, Miguel Marante, Mahler lives a peripatetic life from their RV. Her daughter, Sophia Dominguez-Mahler, is in college. Mahler also has three stepchildren and seven step-grandchildren.
Saskia Sassen is a Dutch-American sociologist noted for her analyses of globalization and international human migration. She is a professor of sociology at Columbia University in New York City, and the London School of Economics. The term global city was coined and popularized by Sassen in her 1991 work, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.
Transnationalism is a research field and social phenomenon grown out of the heightened interconnectivity between people and the receding economic and social significance of boundaries among nation states.
Haitian Americans are a group of Americans of full or partial Haitian origin or descent. The largest proportion of Haitians in the United States live in Little Haiti to the South Florida area. In addition, they have settled in major Northeast cities such as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and in Chicago and Detroit in the Midwest. Most are immigrants or their descendants from the mid-late 20th-century migrations to the United States. Haitian Americans represent the largest group within the Haitian diaspora.
Salvadoran Americans are Americans of full or partial Salvadoran descent. As of 2021, there are 2,473,947 Salvadoran Americans in the United States, the third-largest Hispanic community by nation of ancestry. According to the Census Bureau, in 2021 Salvadorans made up 4.0% of the total Hispanic population in the United States.
Peggy Levitt is the Mildred Lane Kemper Chair of Sociology at Wellesley College and a co-founder of the Global (De)Centre. Her latest book, Transnational Social Protection: Social Welfare Across National Borders was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Her current book project, Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre: Making the World’s Universities, Museums, and Libraries More Welcoming to Everyone will be published by Stanford University Press. Peggy writes regularly about globalization, arts and culture, immigration, and religion.
Manuel A. Vasquez is a prominent Salvadoran scholar of religion and society. As Andrew W. Mellon post-doctoral fellow at Wesleyan University's Center for the Americas and former faculty at the University of Florida, he has focused on the interplay between religion and globalization in the Americas, particularly in Latin America and among U.S. Latinos.
Cuban immigration has greatly affected Miami-Dade County since 1959, creating what is known as "Cuban Miami." However, Miami reflects global trends as well, such as the growing trends of multiculturalism and multiracialism; this reflects the way in which international politics shape local communities.
Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in the programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to Yale, she taught at the University of California, San Diego, and Tufts University. She began as a scholar of French and comparative literature, and since then her work has focused on the cultural politics of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for scholarship on French, British, and United States colonialisms, Asian migration and Asian American studies, race and liberalism, and comparative empires.
Huping Ling is a Chinese American academic. She is a professor of history and past department chair at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, where she founded the Asian studies program. She is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award 2024 by the Association for Asian American Studies. She is the Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Changjiang Scholar Chair Professor of the Chinese Ministry of Education, Distinguished Honorary Professor at Lishui University, and a Visiting Professor of the Institute of Overseas Chinese Studies at Jinan University. She is the funding and inaugural book series editor Asian American Studies Today for Rutgers University Press, on the Editorial Board of Overseas Chinese History Study, the Overseas Chinese History Research Institution, Beijing, China, and served as the Executive Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Asian American Studies. She is also on the Board of Directors of the Chinese Historical Society of Overseas Chinese Studies, the editorial board of Overseas Chinese History Studies, and serves as a consultant to the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of Guangdong Provincial Government.
A neo/new diaspora is the displacement, migration, and dispersion of individuals away from their homelands by forces such as globalization, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Such forces create economic, social, political, and cultural difficulties for individuals in their homeland that forces them to displace and migrate.
Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera is an American cultural anthropologist. She is a tenured Associate Professor at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies teaching in the American Cultural Studies curriculum. Her prior experience includes her work as assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at both Dartmouth College and Drake University. She is a member of the Latin American Studies Association, American Anthropological Association, and Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. Her research is published in journals and books such as Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America. Other publications include reviews of scholarly work. Her academic accomplishments and research pertain to the field of Latinx national migration, indigenous communities in the United States and Mexico, and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands.
Heather A. Horst is a social anthropologist and media studies academic and author who writes on material culture, mobility, and the mediation of social relations. In 2020 she became the Director of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University where she is a Professor and is also a lead investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Prior to this she was a professor of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney from 2017 and Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia from 2011. She has also been a Research Fellow in the MA program in digital anthropology at University College London.
Virginia Dominguez is a political and legal anthropologist. She is currently the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Lionel Cantú Jr., was an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who focused on queer theory, queer issues, and Latin American immigration. His groundbreaking dissertation, The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men, which was edited, compiled, and published posthumously, focuses on the experiences of Mexican-queer migrants.
Latino literature is literature written by people of Latin American ancestry, often but not always in English, most notably by Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans, many of whom were born in the United States. The origin of the term "Latino literature" dates back to the 1960s, during the Chicano Movement, which was a social and political movement by Mexican Americans seeking equal rights and representation. At the time, the term "Chicano literature" was used to describe the work of Mexican-American writers. As the movement expanded, the term "Latino" came into use to encompass writers of various Latin American backgrounds, including Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and others.
Maria Cristina Garcia is an American historian, currently the Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. Her work focuses on the history of displaced and mobile populations in the Americas.
Donna Rae Gabaccia is an American historian who studies international migration, with an emphasis on cultural exchange, such as food and from a gendered perspective. From 2003 to 2005 she was the Andrew Mellon Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and from 2005 to 2012 she held the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair of Immigration History at the University of Minnesota. During the same period, she was the director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. In 2013, her book, Foreign Relations: Global Perspectives on American Immigration won the Immigration and Ethnic History Society's Theodore Saloutos Prize in 2013.
Jorge Duany is a theorist on Caribbean transnational migration and nationalism. Since 2012, he has been director of the Cuban Research Institute and Professor of Anthropology at Florida International University, and has held various teaching positions across the United States and Puerto Rico. His research focuses on concepts of nationalism, ethnicity, race, transnationalism, and migration within the Spanish Caribbean and between the Spanish Caribbean and the United States, particularly regarding Cuba and Puerto Rico.
Patricia Fernández-Kelly is a social anthropologist, academic and researcher. She is Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. She is also the director of the Princeton Center for Migration and Development, associate director of the Program in American Studies, and Chair of the Board at the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund (LALDEF).
Madeline Y. Hsu is an American historian known for her scholarship in Chinese American and Asian American history. She is the director of the Center for Global Migration Studies at the University of Maryland and is an elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians. She is the eldest granddaughter of the neo-Confucian scholar Xu Fuguan.