Center for Global Migration Studies Leadership and Staff

Aldo Bello formed Mind & Media, Inc., a full-service communication and media agency based in Washington, D.C., with Dr. Marilyn Finnemore in 1994. They envisioned a place where they could offer clients excellent communication products and services that make a measurable change in organizations, communities, and our world-products that inspire action. In 2012, Bello received the "Humanitarian Award" from the Americans for Immigrant Justice. He was awarded the Grand Jury Prize, Best Documentary for "What Happened" from the NY International Independent Film & Video Festival; Best Director, Documentary for "What Happened" from the NY International Independent Film & Video Festival; and Best Documentary for "What Happened" from the Long Island International Film Expo. He earned his Master's degree in Radio, Television, and Film from the University of Maryland in 1994. His most recent film, DREAM: An American Story, uses the story of Juan Gomez as a lens with which to view the young immigrant activists known as "Dreamers." The film won an Emmy Award for Best Public/Current/Community Affairs Series.

Martha Berlin was a former Vice President of Westat, a nationally respected survey research organization headquartered in Rockville, MD. The majority of Westat business is conducted under competitive contracts awarded by the Federal Government. She enjoyed 35 years at Westat and was respected as one of the organization's most senior and successful survey managers. Among the projects she directed the “National Assessment of Adult Literacy”, “Study of Reye Syndrome” (a devastating childhood illness that our research determined was caused by baby aspirin) and “Birth Defects and Military Service in Vietnam.” She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin.

Michael di Virgilio is the Director of Collective Bargaining with the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers (BAC). A bricklayer by trade, he served as a Vice President with BAC Local 3-NY from 2006 to 2012. Mr. Di Virgilio earned a B.A. in American Studies from the University of Maryland, an M.A. in American Studies from SUNY at Buffalo, and attended the Harvard Trade Union Program. During graduate school, he was part of the Graduate Group on Industrial Heritage Policy, was assistant to the editor for The Oral History Review, and served as Chapter Steering Committee Chair of the Graduate Student Employees Union, CWA Local 1188, SUNY at Buffalo Chapter. Mr. Di Virgilio has conducted research on various aspects of Italian emigration. He worked for the Folklife Division of the National Park Service's America's Industrial Heritage Project in the early 1990s and was a Scholar-in-Residence with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission in 1995. In 2002, he received the Monsignor Geno Baroni History Prize for an article published in Italian Americana. Since 2008, he has served on the Board of Directors of the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation, a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation.

Timothy Driscoll is Executive Vice President of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers (BAC). He began his apprenticeship with BAC's Local 3 Massachusetts in 1985 and became a Journeyman in 1988. He joined Local 1 Maryland/Virginia/D.C. in 1993 when he moved to the Washington, D.C. metro area. In 1995 he was tapped to join the Interntioanl Union's Government Relations department as a lobbyist for the union, then served as Assistant to the President. In 1999 he was promoted to the position of Director of Trade Jurisdiction, a position he held until his appointment to the Executive Board and an area in which he continues to lead. He holds a BS in Economics from the University of Maryland, and is a graduate of the Harvard Trade Union Program.

 

Julie Greene  is a historian of United States, transnational, and global labor and immigration. She is the author of The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (Penguin Press, 2009), which received the Organization of American Historians’ James A. Rawley Prize for the best book on the history of race relations. The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (Penguin Press, 2009), which received the Organization of American Historians’ James A. Rawley Prize for the best book on the history of race relations. With Eileen Boris, Joo Cheong Tham, and Heidi Gottfried, Greene is co-editor of Global Labor Migration: New Directions (University of Illinois Press). 

Marc Schliefer is the President of Equity Planning Inc and an accomplished and experienced financial planner. He joined the family practice in 1979, and in 1984, he earned the prestigious CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ designation. For over 30 years, Marc has built the firm on his core values and a commitment to placing his clients’ needs above his own. He specializes in personal financial engineering, and his goal is to increase each client’s wealth by creating and implementing tailored and effective financial strategies.

He has been featured on several talk shows and radio broadcasts, and was quoted in the Wall Street Journal (Tax Report, 10/25/2000). He is also a contributor to the John Eric Home Magazine, where he writes a monthly column on pertinent financial topics. Marc attended the University of Maryland, College Park, and holds the FINRA Series 7, 24, 63 securities registrations held with Cetera Advisor Networks, and life and health insurance licenses. He is a member of the Financial Planning Association (FPA®) and the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors (NAIFA), and is on the Planned Giving Committee for the Montgomery College Foundation.

Past Members:

 

Neil Horikoshi serves as president and executive director of the Asian and Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund (APIASF). Prior to joining the APIASF, Mr. Horikoshi had a 30-year career with IBM, serving in a variety of local and executive management roles. He serves as chairman of the board of the Aplastic Anemia & MDS International Foundation, is an advisory council member for both the Asian American Justice Center and the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies and is a Board of Governors member for the "Go for Broke" National Education Center. He has been Member of Washington D.C. Advisory Board of BB & T Corp. since March 2011. He earned his bachelors degree in business administration from the University of Hawaii and a juris doctorate and master's degree in business administration from the University of Southern California.

Michael C. Lin has held many leadership roles within the Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA), including serving as the National Executive Director (2007-08), as the first Chair of the Building Campaign (2003-04) and four years as the National President (1995-98). He is currently the OCA's representative on the Steering Committee of the 1882 Project, initiated last year by the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, National Council of Chinese Americans, and OCA. The 1882 Project is a national initiative to educate Americans about the history and lessons of the historic Chinese Exclusion policy, first enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1882 specifically to bar Chinese and, subsequently, other Asians from immigrating to this country.

After more than 30 years of service, Michael recently retired from the National Institutes of Health where his work contributed to a Nobel Prize. He is currently a member of Maryland Council for New Americans, the Chair of the Board of Trustees of Montgomery College in Maryland and a member of the "Committee of 100." Michael emigrated from Taiwan, China to the U.S. more than 40 years ago. He obtained his doctorate degree in Georgia.

 

Jose Antonio Tijerino is the President and CEO of the Hispanic Heritage Awards Foundation. Mr. Tijerino oversees the operation of the national, nonprofit organization. Prior to this, he was the director of public relations in the communications department for the Fannie Mae Foundation. Before that, he served as a manager for corporate communications for Nike, Inc.'s marketing department and served as a spokesperson. Before joining Nike, Mr. Tijerino developed and managed public relations and public affairs campaigns as an account supervisor for Burson-Marsteller and Cohn & Wolf public relations firms in Washington. He is extremely active in the District of Columbia community by serving on several boards and as communications counsel to numerous nonprofits. In addition, he serves on D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams's Commission on Latino Affairs. Mr. Tijerino earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Maryland where he graduated from the school of journalism and minored in psychology.

Ruth Wasem is a specialist in the Domestic Social Policy Division at the Congressional Research Service, U.S. Library of Congress. In that capacity, she has researched, written, and testified before the U.S. Congress on immigration and social welfare policies. Congressional committees and offices have released many of her reports, which are widely cited. She is also an adjunct professor of public policy at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, where she teaches courses on immigration policy as well as legislative policy making. Wasem earned masters and doctorate degrees in History at the University of Michigan and received her baccalaureate degree in History, Political Science and Psychology from Muskingum University. Her most recent publications include Tackling Unemployment: The Legislative Dynamics of the Employment Act of 1946 (Upjohn Institute Press, 2013) and “Welfare and Public Assistance” in Encyclopedia of American Immigration, 2nd Edition, (M.E. Sharpe, 2013).

Christina Getrich also arrived in Fall 2014, joining the Department of Anthropology. Professor Getrich is a medical anthropologist with an extensive background in qualitative research and experience working with diverse Hispanic and Native American peoples in the Southwest. Her research focuses on health disparities among Hispanic immigrants and on immigration policies and enforcement practices, citizenship and belonging, identity, second-generation youth, and immigrant families. Professor Getrich will arrive at the University just in time for our conference on “Migration, Disease, Medicine, and Public Health in a Global Age: An Exploration of Immigrants and Health in International Perspective” (September 18-20) jointly sponsored by the Center and the Maryland Center for Health Equity. Accompanying the conference will be a massive health festival filling Cole Field House and expected to provide medical and dental care for some 80,000 people. Getrich was originally hired as a member of the cluster faculty.

Perla Guerrero is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies and the first core faculty member in the U.S. Latina/o Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California in 2010. Her research and teaching interests lie comparative race and ethnicity, immigration, space and place, labor, and 20th century U.S. history. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her work is informed by historical methods and human geography as they pertain to Latina/o Studies, American Studies, and the U.S. South. Last year Dr. Guerrero was a Latino Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellow as well as Goldman Sachs Junior Fellow at the National Museum of American History.

Thayse Lima joined the School of Literature, Languages, and Cultures in January 2015. Ms. Lima completed her doctoral work at Brown University, one of the few universities in the United States to have a free-standing PhD-granting Portuguese/Brazilian Department. Her work, which is heavily based in archival research, brings to life a movement in Brazil to bring Brazilian literature into the Latin American mainstream, thereby redefining and broadening the concept of Latin American cultural production itself. Her research, as she describes, “demonstrates how transnational circulation of intellectual thought also has a significant impact in the way cultural identity and geo-cultural borders are conceived.” Lima, a native of Brazil, has four articles in print and one forthcoming. Lima was originally hired as a member of the cluster faculty.

Michelle Magalong is Assistant Professor in the Historic Preservation program at the University of Maryland School of Architecture. Planning and Preservation, where she previously served as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow. She is affiliate faculty in Asian American Studies, Urban Studies and Planning, and American Studies. Dr. Magalong served as President for Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation (APIAHiP), a national nonprofit organization."

Nancy Mirabal joined the faculty in the Department of American Studies in Fall 2014. Professor Mirabal’s work focuses on the migration of Caribbean people to the United States. Her book, Hemispheric Notions: Diaspora, Masculinity, and the Racial Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1945, draws on hundreds of interviews, and she has a strong interest in oral history. She will add to the growing strengths of the Center’s Archive of Immigrant Voices, a digital humanities and oral history project. She comes to UMD from the Department of Latino/a Studies at San Francisco State University.

Julie Park is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland. She is also a faculty associate of the Maryland Population Research Center (MPRC). Professor Park's research focuses most broadly on the adaptation process of immigrants in the United States which includes the areas of immigration, demography, race, and urban studies. Professor Park currently teaches courses in immigration, Asian Americans Studies, and social demography. Other undergraduate courses include Asian American Public Policy and Interethnic Diversity in the West. She has also taught the following graduate courses: Urban Demography and Growth, Urban Diversity and Communication, and Statistics and Arguing from Data.

Sangeeta Ray is professor of English and Comparative Literature. She teaches anglophone postcolonial literature, South Asian literature, literature from the black diaspora, and Asian American literature. Her work is always attuned to questions of gender and sexuality. Her current interests include environmental studies as well the field of refugee studies. She is primarily a literary scholar engaged in questions of form and genre, postcolonial reading practices and the relationship between aesthetics, ethics and politics.

Psyche Williams-Forson is Professor and Chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. She is an affiliate faculty member of the Theatre, Dance, and Performing Studies, the Departments of Anthropology, African American Studies, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity. She is a material culturalist who examines the lives of African Americans living in the United States from the late 19th century to the present. Her research explores the ways in which Black people (broadly define) engage their material worlds, especially with food and food cultures as well as historical legacies of race and gender (mis)representation. She has conducted extensive research throughout the United States in this area using intersectionality, cultural studies, popular culture, and more to inform our understanding of these phenomena.

Janelle Wong is Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland. Prior to joining the University of Maryland in 2012, she was at the University of Southern California in the Departments of Political Science and American Studies and Ethnicity. Wong is author of Immigrants, Evangelicals and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change (2018, Russell Sage Foundation Press), Democracy’s Promise: Immigrants and American Civic Institutions (2006, University of Michigan Press) and co-author of two books on Asian American politics. The most recent is Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and their Political Identities (2011, Russell Sage Foundation), based on the first nationally representative survey of Asian Americans’ political attitudes and behavior. This groundbreaking study of Asian Americans was conducted in eight different languages with six different Asian national origin groups.

Colleen Woods studies US history in a global context, with a special focus on Asia and the Pacific. Her research interests include: US Empire, transnational politics (anticommunism and communism), decolonization, and global imperial history. Woods has published Freedom Incorporated: American Imperialism and Philippine Independence in the Age of Decolonization with Cornell University Press which argues that U.S. imperialism and anticommunist politics were intertwined in the Philippines between the 1930s and the late 1950s. Woods teaches graduate readings courses on U.S, U.S. in the World, and Global History and undergraduate courses on U.S. foreign affairs from the colonial era to the present, WWII in the Pacific, the Vietnam War, historical memory, as well as an undergraduate research seminar titled “State Secrets: Writing the History of the CIA."

Neel Ahuja is Professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is Director of Undergraduate Studies. Neel teaches a variety of courses in critical race and ethnic studies, feminist science studies, disability studies, and environmental humanities. His research explores the relationship of the body to the geopolitical, environmental, and public health contexts of colonial governance, warfare, and security. Neel is the author of two books, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016) and Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century (2021)."

Muna Adem is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. Her research lies at the intersection of race, ethnicity, and immigration. More specifically, Adem is interested in examining how immigration-driven diversity influence race relations, group divisions and ethnoracial inequalities both in the US and Europe. Her current projects examine (1) the ways in which race and immigration status shapes (mis)trust and cooperation at the micro level, (2) the ways in which organizations and elite actors contribute to the (in)stability of ethnoracial and stratification systems, (3) attitudes toward citizenship ideologies, national and ethnoracial identities in the US and Europe, and (4) perceived discrimination and anti-black distancing among immigrant groups. To answer her research questions, Adem employs several strategies, including survey experiments and behavioral experiments, network and text analysis and mixed methods."

Cécile Accilien is Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the School of Language, Literatures and Cultures. Her area of studies are Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures and Film & Media Studies.  She is the co-editor (with Valerie Orlando) of Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives  and the co-author (with Krishauna Hines Gaither) of The Antiracism World Language Classroom. She recently published a monograph Bay lodyans: Haitian Popular Film Culture  with SUNY Press.  She is the 2023 president of the Haitian Studies Association. She has written for Truthout and Latin American Commentator."

Patrick Chung specializes in U.S. military history. His research interests also include the histories of the U.S. in the World, global capitalism, East Asia, and Asian America. He offers courses on global and U.S. military history. His current research focuses on the relationship between the growth of the military-industrial complex in the United States and the industrialization of East Asia during the Cold War. He is working on a book (Building Global Capitalism) that traces the impact of the U.S. military on the “miraculous” growth of the South Korean economy.

David Freund is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland who specializes in 20th-century U.S. history, with a research focus on the American metropolis, racial politics, and the impacts of public policy on economic opportunity and popular ideology. He is the author of Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Surburban America. His current projects include a book-length history of the federal state's impact on financial markets, economic growth, and free market ideology since the Great Depression and The Modern American Metropolis, an edited source book for Wiley Blackwell.

Clara Irazábal is the Director of the Urban Studies and Planning Program (URSP) in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (MAPP) at the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park, in the Washington DC area. Irazábal has published academic work in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. She is the author of Urban Governance and City Making in the Americas: Curitiba and Portland (Ashgate, 2005) and the editor of Transbordering Latin Americas: Liminal Places, Cultures, and Powers (T)Here (Routledge 2014) and Ordinary Places, Extraordinary Events: Citizenship, Democracy, and Public Space in Latin America (Routledge 2008, 2015). Irazábal is an editorial board member of internationally accredited architectural and planning journals and book presses, including associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA).

Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. He is a comparative and historical sociologist. In one line of research, Professor Korzeniewicz studies different dimensions of global inequality (e.g., between countries, within countries, and between men and women). A second line of research focuses on social movements, particularly in Latin America. Using a World-Systems approach, his recent work has examined the interaction between globalization, inequality and structural adjustment policies, as well as patterns of response and participation by civil society to free trade agreements in the Americas. His latest book is Unveiling Inequality: A World-Historical Perspective.

Alan Kraut is Professor of History and an affiliate faculty member of the School of International Service at American University. He is also a Non-resident Fellow of the Migration Policy Institute. The immediate past President of the Organization of American Historians, the largest professional organization of American historians, he specializes in U.S. immigration and ethnic history, the history of medicine in the U.S., and nineteenth-century US history. He has authored or edited nine books and over a hundred articles. His book Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (Basic, 1994) won several national awards, including the Theodore Saloutos Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the Phi Alpha Theta Award for the Best Book in History by an established author. Most recently, he has co-edited Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping the Nation's Immigration Story (Rutgers University Press, 2013). He received his Ph. D. in history from Cornell University in 1975.

Siv B. Lie is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland. Her research in ethnomusicology and linguistic anthropology examines the cultural politics of expressive practices and minority rights with a focus on how Romani ("Gypsy") populations use music and language to serve their own social, political, and economic interests. Siv has published in Popular Music and Society and Ethnic and Racial Studies and has a piece forthcoming in Jazz and Culture. She is co-founder and Principal Coordinator of the Initiative for Romani Music at New York University, an organization that brings together scholars, artists, and community members to raise awareness about Romani musics and cultures, and Co-Curator of the Music section of RomArchive, a digital archive of Romani arts set to launch in 2018. She received her Ph.D. from New York University.

Peter Mallios is an Associate Professor of English and founding director of the Foreign Literatures in America project at the University of Maryland. His research and teaching focus on 19th and 20th century U.S. literature, history, law, and politics, and global developments in the modern and modernist novel. He is the author of Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity (Stanford UP, 2010) and is currently working on two book projects: a history of foreign authored literature in the U.S., and a study of the constitutional effects of the Woodrow Wilson administration on modern American literature.

Linda Rabben is an associate research professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland. Professor Rabben has studied, written about and worked on migration, human rights, development and environmental issues in the United States, Brazil and other countries for more than 25 years. Her professional experience includes writing, research, training and public speaking on migration for numerous organizations, such as Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, immigrant rights groups, religious congregations and community groups. She is the author of many books and articles, including Sanctuary and Asylum: A Social and Political History (University of Washington Press, 2016). Her migration research has included fieldwork in the United States, Britain, France and the Netherlands. She did graduate work at Sussex University(UK) and received a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology and Latin American studies from Cornell University.

David Sicilia is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Henry Kaufman Fellow in Business History in the Robert H. Smith School of Business. His research and teaching focus on the evolution of global and U.S. capitalism, including the role of immigrant entrepreneurs. He is co-author or co-editor of seven books and numerous articles on business and economic history, and a frequent commentator on national and international media outlets.

Ana Ndumu is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Studies. She focuses on the cross between social identity and information behavior, particularly the ways in which accessible and adequate information strengthens marginalized communities. Dr. Ndumu explores the intersection of libraries, demography, and social inclusion. Her recent works examine the information worlds of African, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latinx immigrants living in the U.S. She also researches the contributions of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to library and information science (LIS) education.

Chinyere Osuji is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and Behavioral & Social Sciences. Her research examines how Blacks around the world understand and negotiate social interactions with racial and ethnic others and its implications for justice and equity. Her first book, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race (2019, NYU Press) compares how Black-White couples in Brazil and the United States understand and negotiate racial boundaries. Boundaries of Love relies on over 100 interviews with Black-White couples in these two countries to compare how national racial ideologies (colorblindness vs. racial democracy), gender and other social categories yield particular meanings of race and race-mixing."