Teaching

Helen Marrow

Lecturer, Committee on Degrees in Social Studies

Biographical Note

Helen B. Marrow received her B.A. in Sociology and Latin American Studies from Princeton University in 2000 and her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University in 2007. Her intellectual interests include immigration, race and ethnicity, qualitative research methods, and inequality and social policy.

Helen has recently published on second-generation Brazilians in the United States (Ethnicities, 2003), the dispersion of U.S. immigration streams into new destinations (Perspectives on Politics, 2005), and intergroup relations in the rural U.S. South. Along with Mary C. Waters (Sociology, Harvard University) and Reed Ueda (History, Tufts University), she is co-editor of the volume The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965 (Harvard University Press, 2007), in which she authors an entry on immigrants from South America and an entry on immigrants from southern Africa.

She is currently revising material from her dissertation, entitled "Southern Becoming: Immigrant Incorporation and Race Relations in the Rural U.S. South", which was a local-level (2-county) comparative study of the economic, sociocultural, racial, and political incorporation of new Latin American immigrants and U.S.-born Hispanics/Latinos in the rural and small-town U.S. South. This work explores the ways in which the rural South, as a new immigrant destination context, affects Hispanic newcomers' experiences, mobility paths, and interactions with mainstream Americans. Its central finding is that rural context matters by reducing the distance newcomers have to travel in order to join the local American economic mainstream, which is positive, while also expanding the difference they have to travel to join the local American social and cultural mainstream, which is concerning, and moreover, involves perceptions of greater exclusion from rural Southern black than from rural Southern white society. Throughout, attention is paid to the ways in which lack of legal status impedes many of these newcomers' abilities to become fully incorporated into various dimensions of rural Southern life.

In January and February 2006, she served as a visiting scholar at the Geary Institute, University College Dublin, where she conducted a qualitative study on Latin American immigrants in Ireland (advisor: Dorren McMahon). She is currently writing up results from this research in a working paper.

In 2001, 2002, and Fall 2008, Helen received Certificates of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning and the Office of the Dean for Undergraduate Education. In Spring 2008, she is teaching a junior tutorial on contemporary U.S. immigration for Sociology concentrators.

In 2008-10, she will be a Robert Wood Johnson postdoctoral fellow in Health Policy at UC-Berkeley/UC-San Francisco, where she will investigate the responses of healthcare institutions and workers to undocumented immigration. She regrets that she is unable to supervise any Harvard undergraduate senior theses in 2008-09.

04/14/2008

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