Jeffrey Kahn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He received a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2013 and a JD from Yale Law School in 2010. His areas of interest include border securitization, migration, maritime worlds, sovereignty, law, space, and ritual. Geographically, he has focused on Haiti, the United States, the Guantánamo Naval Base, and the Republic of Bénin.
His award-winning first book, Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire (University of Chicago Press 2019), examines how boat migration from Haiti to the United States during the last three decades of the twentieth century led to the development of new forms of legal activism, border governance, and oceanic policing that would remake the spatiality of the American nation-state. He is working on a second book that explores the networks of maritime circulation, the land and sea-based economies, and the cosmologies of mobility that Haitians have fashioned in a Caribbean increasingly saturated by American securitization projects. His previous research has looked at state-sponsored witch-hunting campaigns and the circulation of witch-finding deities in the Republic of Bénin.
His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the American Society for Legal History, and the Hellman Fellows Fund. Prior to joining the Anthropology Department at UC Davis, he was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, an Associate Research Scholar in Law/Robina Foundation International Human Rights Fellow at Yale Law School, and a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He is currently a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
His award-winning first book, Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire (University of Chicago Press 2019), examines how boat migration from Haiti to the United States during the last three decades of the twentieth century led to the development of new forms of legal activism, border governance, and oceanic policing that would remake the spatiality of the American nation-state. He is working on a second book that explores the networks of maritime circulation, the land and sea-based economies, and the cosmologies of mobility that Haitians have fashioned in a Caribbean increasingly saturated by American securitization projects. His previous research has looked at state-sponsored witch-hunting campaigns and the circulation of witch-finding deities in the Republic of Bénin.
His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the American Society for Legal History, and the Hellman Fellows Fund. Prior to joining the Anthropology Department at UC Davis, he was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, an Associate Research Scholar in Law/Robina Foundation International Human Rights Fellow at Yale Law School, and a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He is currently a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Copyright © 2019 Jeffrey Kahn