Jeffrey Kahn is an Associate 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 law, border securitization, migration, maritime worlds, sovereignty, space, semiotics, racialization, and ritual. Geographically, he has focused on Haiti, the United States, and the Caribbean.
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 U.S. securitization projects.
His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the American Society for Legal History, the Hellman Fellows Fund, and a fellowship at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. 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.
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 U.S. securitization projects.
His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the American Society for Legal History, the Hellman Fellows Fund, and a fellowship at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. 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.
Copyright © 2019 Jeffrey Kahn