Michigan Alumna Natalia Molina Named MacArthur Fellow

Often colloquially referred to as a "genius grant," MacArthur names fellows to recognize and encourage people of outstanding talent in creative, professional, and intellectual endeavors.   We have long known that Prof. Molina has been an exceptional historian whose pathbreaking work revealed and challenged ideas about race and citizenship.  She has shown how exclusionary practices and processes in the past kept Latinx and Asian immigrants from achieving full equality within the nation.  When Molina received her degree from the University of Michigan in 2001, she was only the 25th Latina in the U.S. to have ever earned a Ph.D. in history. Since graduating, Prof. Molina has written Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (2006) and How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (2014).  She has also been a leader on her campuses and within the larger field of history.  You can read more about Prof. Molina here.