Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Capitalism and Comparative Racialization 2017-2018

Sawyer Seminar Fellows

Jessica Ordaz

John E. Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow

Jessica Ordaz is the 2017-18 John E. Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington. She received her Ph.D. from the History Department at the University of California,Davis. Her dissertation historicized the El Centro Immigration Detention Center, a facility located in California’s Imperial Valley, to explore the rise of immigration detention in the United States. This study also examines migrant politics, how detained non-citizens protested their
confinement via hunger strikes, demonstrations and lawsuits. Ordaz received funding from UC MEXUS, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, UC California Studies Consortium, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, and the UC Davis Hemispheric Institute of the Americas. In the fall of 2018 she will begin teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder as an Assistant Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department.

Vanessa Quince

John E. Sawyer Dissertation Fellow

Vanessa Quince is a 2017-18 John E. Sawyer Dissertation Fellow at the University of Washington and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science. Her dissertation, “Racism By Design: The Role of Race and Identity in Institutional Design” focuses on the role of race and identity in how states design international trade agreements. In her work, she argues that states will design favorable trade agreements with states they perceive as part of their racialized in-group than with states perceived as part of their racialized outgroup, and these differences have important implications for development. She is a graduate fellow in the Washington Institute for the Study of Inequality and Race (WISIR) and the University of Washington Security Colloquium (UWISC).

Roneva Keel

John E. Sawyer Dissertation Fellow

Roneva Keel is a 2017-2108 John E. Sawyer Dissertation Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate in the department of History at the University of Washington. Her research interests have focused on the role of agricultural development in modern state formations, with an emphasis on the mobilization of workers across borders and oceans. Her dissertation, “Mobilizing Empire: Race, Sugar, and U.S. Colonialism in the Pacific, 1898-1934,” brings together the histories of colonization in California, Hawai‘i, and the Philippines to explore the historical development of race and capitalism in the formation of the U.S. empire. She is a graduate fellow in the Washington Institute for the Study of Inequality and Race (WISIR) and serves as the Digital Humanities Initiative Program Coordinator at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington.