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Lorrin Thomas
joined the Rutgers-Camden faculty in 2004 after completing a Woodrow
Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Hagley Library and
Rutgers-Camden. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, where she studied the history of the Americas with an emphasis on migration, cities,
politics, and racial identities.
Professor
Thomas’s research interests have focused on citizenship as a measure of
inclusion in—as well as exclusion from—the nation. She is currently
working on a book called Juan Q. Citizen: Puerto Ricans
and the Politics of Citizenship in New York City, 1917-1970 (under
contract with the University of Chicago Press). The book explores the exceptional experience
of Puerto Rican migrants as United States citizens on the mainland, situating
Puerto Ricans as key actors in the twentieth-century history of New York City. Juan Q.
Citizen probes the limits of liberal
American citizenship for a group marked by its colonial relationship to
the United
States, and shows how, in spite of their political
activism, Puerto Ricans were consistently marginalized in liberals’
pluralist and universalizing project of recasting social citizenship in
the US between the Depression and the 1960s.
Professor Thomas
teaches a range of courses in both Latin American history and the
history of the Americas, including surveys of colonial and modern Latin America. She also teaches graduate and undergraduate
courses that examine the rich and complex history of racial and ethnic
identities in the Americas from 1492 to the present. In fall 2007, she
will teach a course on the history of refugees in the 20th
century, which will emphasize the experience of refugees and asylees in
and from Latin America.
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