Duke-UNC 2025 Keohane Lecture: Kelly Lytle Hernández “Emancipation and the Origins of U.S. Immigration Control, 1803-1875”

Kelly Lytle Hernández is currently the Duke-UNC 2025-2026 Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor. As part of the professorship, Hernández will give a series talks and events during the year. UNC is proud to host the first of these events, “Emancipation and the Origins of U.S. Immigration Control, 1803-1875,” which will chronicle the rise of U.S. immigration control as a response to emancipation in Haiti and the United States.

This event will take place on Monday, September 29, 2025 at 2:00 PM (EST) in the Wilson Library’s Pleasants Family Assembly Room at UNC-Chapel Hill. Attendance via Zoom (pre-registration required) will also be available: Register Here.

Professor Kelly Lytle Hernández holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (Norton, 2022). She is also the founding director and principal advisor for the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which documents the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize Board.