Angela Naomi Paik

Associate Professor

A. Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press) and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (2016, UNC Press; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017), as well as articles, opinion pieces, and interviews in a range of academic and public-facing venues. She is co-chair of the Radical History Review editorial collective and has co-edited three special issues of the journal—“Militarism and Capitalism (Winter 2019), “Radical Histories of Sanctuary” (Fall 2019), and “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination” (Spring 2020)—and will coedit “Against the Anthropocene” with Ashley Dawson (Winter 2023). Collaborating with Gerry Cadava and Cat Ramirez, she coedits the “Borderlands” section of Public Books. She is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a member of the Migration Scholars Collaborative. She earned her doctorate in American studies from Yale University. Her research and teaching interests include comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; abolition; and labor, race, and migration.

Awards

Winner, Best Book in History, Association for Asian American Studies, for Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prisons Camps since World War II Runner-up/Finalist, John Hope Franklin Prize for best book in American Studies, American Studies Association, for Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prisons Camps since World War II Helen Corley Petit Scholar, recognizing “extraordinary” early career faculty, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign HRI-Mellon Faculty Fellow in Legal Humanities, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation, 2019-201 Resident Associate, “Abolition,” Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2019-2021 Winner, Prize for Best Faculty Research, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, for the article “Between Rights and Rightlessness: Haitian Immigrants and the Elusive Promises of Humanitarianism”

Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding Immigration for the 21st Century
May 2020, University of California Press.

Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II
April 2016, University of North Carolina Press.

“Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination,” Special Issue of Radical History
Review, Summer 2020
Co-edited with Amy Chazkel and Monica Kim. Issue 137 (May 2020)

“Radical Histories of Sanctuary,” Special Issue of Radical History Review.
Co-edited with Jason Ruiz and Rebecca Schrieber. Issue 135 (October 2019): 1-13.

“Militarism and Capitalism: The Work and Wages of Violence,” Special Issue of Radical History Review, Winter 2019.
Co-edited with Melina Pappademos and Simeon Man. Issue 133 (January 2019).

“Towards Abolitionist Unionism: Resisting Pandemics, Police, and Academic Austerity at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign”
Journal of Academic Freedom, Volume 12 (Fall 2021). Co-authored with Chelsea Birchmier, Austin Hoffman, Angela Ting, and Logan Middleton

“Universities, Unjust Law, and Campus Sanctuaries”
Invited contribution to Departures in Qualitative Research, “Sanctuary, Fugitivity, and
Insurgent Models of Immigrant Justice,” Spring 2020, 95-100

“Between Rights and Rightlessness: Haitian Migrants and the Elusive Promises of Humanitarianism”
Invited article for e-misferica, 14: 1 (2019). Special Issue on “Expulsions/Expulsión/ Expulsão,” edited by Marcial Godoy and Macarena Gómez-Barris.

“Representing the Disappeared Body: Hunger Strikes at Guantánamo”
Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 9:3 (Winter 2018): 423-448.

“Abolitionist Futures and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement”
Race & Class, 59:2 (Fall 2017): 3-25.

“Education and Empire, Old and New: H.R. 3077 and the Resurgence of the
U.S. Imperial University”
Cultural Dynamics, 25:1 (March 2013): 3-28.

“Carceral Quarantine at Guantánamo: Legacies of U.S. Imprisonment of Haitian Refugees, 1991-1994”
Radical History Review, 115:1 (Winter 2013): 142-168. Special Issue on “Haitian Lives/Global Perspectives,” edited by Amy Chazkel, Melina Pappademos, and Karen Sotiropoulos.

“Testifying to Rightlessness: Haitian Refugees Speaking from Guantánamo”
Social Text, 28:3 (Fall 2010): 39-65. Special issue on “Dislocations Across the Americas,” edited by Micol Siegel and David Sartorius.

“From “Crisis” to Futurity: Migration and Borderlands in the 21st Century”
Co-edited with Geraldo Cadava and Catherine Ramirez. Collection of essays and introduction for Public Books, Borderlands, July 5, 2021, (https://www.publicbooks.org/from-crisis-to-futurity-migration-and-borderlands-in-the-21st-century/)

“Create a Different Language”: Behrouz Boochani & Omid Tofighian”
Public Books, Borderlands, April 14, 2021, (https://www.publicbooks.org/create-a-different-language-behrouz-boochani-omid-tofighian/)

“On Collective Grief and Lines of Solidarity”
Society & Space, March 23, 2021, contribution to forum on anti-Asian violence, (https://societyandspace.webflow.io/articles/on-collective-grief-and-lines-of-solidarity)

“Abolishing Police Includes Abolishing ICE and Border Protection”
Truthout, July 13, 2020, (https://truthout.org/articles/abolishing-police-includes-abolishing-ice-and-border-protection/).