CDS to Host Visiting Keohane Professor Exploring Race, Policing and the Roots of U.S. Immigration
UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernández joins Duke and UNC as the 2025–26 Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor. On February 9, she will speak at CDS on race, reform and U.S. Immigration between 1952 and 1965.
Kelly Lytle Hernández grew up in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands during the 1980s and ’90s — a period marked by the rapid expansion of immigration law enforcement. Border Patrol was a major part of everyday life, she says, prompting her to ask many questions about race and policing.
“I wanted to know why Latinos, namely Mexicans, seemed to be the racialized targets of U.S. immigration law enforcement,” says Hernández, who has been appointed the Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor at Duke and UNC Chapel Hill. “I’ve spent my career trying to answer this question and more, using archival research and other methods to get at the root of the story.”
Hernández holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. As the Keohane Professor for the 2025-2026 academic year, she will engage with students and faculty on both campuses and give three public lectures that reframe U.S. immigration history:
- Sept. 29 at UNC: “Emancipation and the Origins of U.S. Immigration Control, 1803-1875,” hosted by UNC’s Latina/o Studies Program, Department of English and Department of Comparative Language
- Feb. 9 at Duke: ‘“Half a Loaf’: Race, Reform and the U.S. Immigration Regime, 1952 – 1965,” hosted by the hosted by the Duke Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) and the Department of History
- Apr. 13 at Duke: “Still Racist: The U.S. Immigration Regime, 1965 to Now,” hosted by hosted by the Department of History and CDS.
“I am looking forward to engaging students across the two campuses,” Hernández says. “I’m eager to hear their migration stories and learn what interests them about U.S. immigration history. I hope students feel empowered by the historical content and analysis at the heart of my work.”
Bridging Scholarship and Social Change
One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration and mass incarceration, Hernández is the founder of Million Dollar Hoods, a research project that maps the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. She is the author of several award-winning books:
- “Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol” (University of California Press, 2010)
- “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles”(University of North Carolina Press, 2017)
- “Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands”(Norton, 2022).
Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prizes Board.
About the Keohane Professorship
The Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professorship brings prominent scholars to UNC Chapel Hill and Duke for a one-year period, during which they deliver a lecture series and engage students and faculty around areas of shared interest to both institutions. Ultimately, the program is designed to energize new scholarly connections between Duke and UNC.
Created in 2004 by James Moeser, who served as UNC’s chancellor at the time, the professorship recognizes Keohane’s contributions during her term as Duke’s president and seeks to strengthen the collaboration she and Moeser built between the two institutions.
The professorship was funded by the late Josie and Julian Robertson (parents of Spencer Robertson, Duke ’98, and Alex Robertson, UNC ’01) and the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust.
Last year’s Keohane Professor was Ashon T. Crawley, artist and scholar of religious studies and African American and African studies at the University of Virginia.
