Cover of Allison Powers’ magnificent book, Arbitrating Empire
New book alert, absolute must-read for anyone interested in the history of US empire and international law:
Allison Powers, Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law
global.oup.com/academic/pro...
18.11.2025 16:38 — 👍 20 🔁 7 💬 1 📌 0
Cover image for Rachel's new book, The Future in Their Hands. White and teal colorblock background. Middle image is watercolor illustration showing 6 human figures working.
We're website official!
Coming in May 2026 @ucpress.bsky.social...
www.ucpress.edu/books/the-fu...
28.10.2025 14:53 — 👍 15 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 3
I got to talk to @npr.org about sheriffs, jails, and all the ways people have made money from locking up migrants. (Featuring many stories from my book!)
19.09.2025 13:24 — 👍 10 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0
Alligator Alcatraz may be tied up in court. But plans for the next large-scale detention facilities in collab. w/ states will use ALREADY BUILT prisons. That could help the feds avoid the legal problems of building something new.
22.08.2025 16:12 — 👍 65 🔁 33 💬 6 📌 0
V glad to talk to @missionlocal.org about a personal obsession—the San Francisco office building that has been quietly detaining immigrants since WWII.
15.08.2025 14:58 — 👍 3 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
Immigration History Manuscript Workshop
IHRC seeks authors finishing a US immigration history book (colonial era–present) for feedback from experts at the Organization of American Historians conference.
Are you nearing completion on a book manuscript addressing any aspect of US immigration history from the colonial era to the present? Apply for our manuscript workshop!
More info at z.umn.edu/ManuscriptWorkshop
@migrationcollab.bsky.social @iehs.bsky.social
12.08.2025 16:04 — 👍 7 🔁 9 💬 0 📌 0
From the AskHistorians community on Reddit
Explore this post and more from the AskHistorians community
Its #AMA time once again #Skystorians! Brianna Nofil, author of "The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration" is here to answer all your questions about immigration detention, deportation, and how the U.S. has policed its borders.
17.06.2025 16:13 — 👍 13 🔁 6 💬 0 📌 1
Nothing about this is surprising. The revolving door between ICE and private prison companies is longstanding and just reveals how the state and capital collaborate to lock up immigrants. It’s easy to be alarmed by privatization but the state and neoliberalism is why these companies exist at all
27.05.2025 14:28 — 👍 13 🔁 11 💬 0 📌 0
OAH Jackson Turner Prize, Hawley Prize to Nofil, "The Migrant's Jail"
At its annual meeting in April, the Organization of American Historians awarded the Frederick Jackson Turner Award ("given annually to the author of a first scholarly book dealing with some aspect of American history" to Brianna Nofil (William & Mary) for The Migrants Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration (Princeton University Press). The citation:
Brianna Nofil’s The Migrant’s Jail explains how a century of political, economic, and ideological exchange between the U.S. immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system gave rise to world’s largest system of migrant incarceration. Ultimately, it asks (and answers) the question: How can a self-proclaimed nation of immigrants also be a place that imprisons tens of thousands of immigrants, exiles, and refugees? Migrant incarceration remade the political economy of American jails and rewrote the constitutional rights of noncitizens, as local entities competed for federal revenue associated with the practice, even before private prison companies entered the business in the 1980s. This dispersed, local participation in turn helped cultivate popular fears and the myth of migrant harm that have infused a broader American national discourse. The Migrant’s Jail is an important, original, and surprising story, well told, based on extensive, impressive research and analysis. It is a timely national account grounded in local places and institutions, offering broad regional and chronological coverage and perceptively illuminating a central contemporary controversy—one that has been around longer than we might imagine and one that afflicts us now more than ever.
The Migrant's Jail also received the OAH's Ellis W. Hawley prize ("for the best book-length historical study of the political economy, politics, or institutions of the United States, in its domestic or international affairs, from the Civil War to the present") The citation:
The Migrants Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration, by Brianna Nofil, is an excellent example of why history matters to modern discussions of migration, immigration, and detention. This timely and meticulously researched study guides readers across the United States and through a century of history while employing a combination of compelling and consistent analysis from beginning to end. “The Migrant’s Jail,” as Nofil states, “tells a national story about local institutions.” Such a focus asks readers and scholars to combine our awareness of court cases and federal restriction policies with the lesser-known cooperative action and resource assistance from American counties that have made, and continue to make, mass detention and deportation possible. The result of this reality, and the “exchange between U.S. immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system,” is the creation of “the world’s largest mass incarceration system.” It is the sincere honor of this committee to recognize, with unanimous and uncontested consensus, Brianna Nofil and The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration as the winner of the 2024 Ellis W. Hawley Prize.
Congratulations to Professor Nofil!
-- Karen Tani
05.05.2025 13:04 — 👍 3 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
Discount flyer for Teaching Gender, advertising promotion code AUFLY30.
Feels obviously insane to post this today Amidst Everything, but today is Teaching Gender's official print publication day. You can read more about the book here global.oup.com/academic/pro..., and there is a discount code you can use to purchase it if e.g. you have an academic research allowance.
17.04.2025 11:39 — 👍 81 🔁 22 💬 7 📌 1
Check out this panel at Yale Public Humanities Working Group discussing migrant mass incarceration, with @briannanofil.bsky.social, Harold Solis, and me. The intrepid Alicia Schmidt Camacho will be moderating.
16.04.2025 18:20 — 👍 9 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0
Trump Administration Aims to Spend $45 Billion to Expand Immigrant Detention
A request for proposals for new detention facilities and other services would allow the government to expedite the contracting process and rapidly expand detention.
this is a staggering amount of money to build camps—suggesting that building & running a gulag will be the primary function of the otherwise gutted Trump-state
in last fiscal yr: "D.H.S. allocated about $3.4 billion for the entire custody operation overseen by ICE"
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/u...
08.04.2025 04:27 — 👍 4232 🔁 2462 💬 277 📌 466
Chief Policy Counsel, Council on Criminal Justice. Advancing public safety, individual liberty, and equal justice for all.
@chowleen most elsewhere; my old tweets reappear here at odd times.
Duke prof, APSI Dir+DGS, Duke Story Lab founder. DUP Sinotheory, LAReviewOfBooks board. Shewo Institute 舍我紀念館 Director, Biographical Lit 傳記文學 publisher
周成蔭 #everynightapoem
The Journal of Southern History—published by the Southern Historical Association and edited at and supported by Rice University—is a quarterly devoted to the history of the American South broadly conceived. thesha.org/jsh
art & architectural historian / visual, material & religious culture
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame. Historian of Immigration, Race and Nationalism in 19th Century USA, and Irish-American political views on 19th Century imperialism and anti-slavery
Sociologist of gender, punishment & society, welfare state, law, drugs. Professor at Bard College. Author of Addicted to Rehab: Race, Gender, and Drugs in the Era of Mass Incarceration.
PhD student of English and Central American Studies
Columbia University
Law professor, Drexel Univ • Affil'd fellow, Yale ISP • NYC Bar Ass'n Rule of Law Task Force • AAUP Committee A on Academic Freedom & Tenure ⚾ Cleveland native/partisan 🏀 runner • https://linktr.ee/akalhan
Historian researching prison labour and citizenship in Britain & British Empire, 1750-1895. Leverhulme ECF & University of Leicester.
Author | Watching Women: Militant Suffragists Write the British Surveillance State | U Toronto Press, 2024
Assoc Prof of English in Tucson | Surveillance | C20/21 Caribbean and British Lit | GWS
rock scrambler | hawk enthusiast | she/her
faculty of collective wonders for Yale Spanish & Portuguese. materialist spelunker and otrAmerican. he/him/colibri.
News re. Jail, Prison, Abolition, Decarceration, Criminology, Addiction, Sex Work, Blood Borne Pathogens, et al. ($) = Paywall.
Podcaster, Historian, Writer, living in Salinas, California. Check out the Interesting Pod: https://pod.link/1826088946. Doctoral degree in counseling, pursuing a history PhD. I love hiking, mystery reading, & eating cereal in perilously unhealthy volumes.
Border Criminologies draws together researchers working in #criminology on #bordercontrol. Retweets/links to media or other websites do not imply endorsements.
https://linktr.ee/bordercrim
Staff writer @theatlantic.com covering immigration and the Department of Homeland Security.
Tips? Signal: NickMiroff.78
Univ admin by day. Knitter & Podcaster by night. Feminist mom in Chicago always. Lover of mystery novels, espresso, sauv blanc & kittens. She/her.
Host, Unsung History. https://www.unsunghistorypodcast.com
Writing a transatlantic family history/memoir.
Historian | Mobility Infrastructures | 19th-Century Worlds | Revolutions and Post-independences | Brazil
National reporter for USA TODAY. Human migration. Borders. Preguntona. Fronteriza.
Independent, nonprofit news for San Francisco.
Sign up for our newsletter: https://missionlocal.org/subscribe-to-the-mission-local-newsletter/
Donate to keep us writing: https://missionlocal.org/support-our-publication/
