This event is co-presented by Glucksman Ireland House and the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora NYU. Kevin Kenny will be in conversation with Michael Gomez. Kimberly DaCosta will introduce the event.
Today the United States considers immigration a federal matter. Yet the Constitution is silent on the admission, exclusion, and expulsion of foreigners. In the century after the American Revolution, the states controlled mobility within and across their borders and set their own rules for community membership. The federal government played almost no role in regulating immigration or defining citizenship. In The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic (Oxford University Press, 2023), Kevin Kenny argues that the existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery were central to the emergence of a national immigration policy in the nineteenth century.
Kevin Kenny is Glucksman Professor of History and Director of Glucksman Ireland House at NYU. Michael Gomez is Silver Professor, Professor of History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, and Director of the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora at NYU. Kimberly DaCosta, Associate Professor of Sociology at NYU, specializes in racial inequality and the contemporary production of racial boundaries, and has been involved in NYU's Prison Education Program since its inception in 2013.
