UC Press is thrilled to share that UCLA professor and UC Press author Kelly Lytle Hernández has been named a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.

Photo credit: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Distributed annually since 1981, the MacArthur Fellowship includes a $625,000 stipend awarded “to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential . . . [the recipients] may use their fellowship to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers . . . Indeed, the purpose of the MacArthur Fellows Program is to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society.”

In 2010, UC Press published Lytle Hernández’s debut book, Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol, tracing the story of the U.S. Border Patrol from its beginnings in 1924 as a small peripheral outfit to its contemporary emergence as a large professional police force that continuously draws intense scrutiny and denunciations from political activism groups.

This year, Lytle Hernández guest-edited a special issue of the Pacific Historical Review entitled “The Carceral West.” Whereas scholarship on the carceral state has traditionally focused on the U.S. South, the urban North, and post-war Los Angeles, scholars have more recently begun to focus on the long history of incarceration throughout the U.S. West. The West provides a rich environment for examining the carceral state, especially as it relates to race and immigration. UC Press and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association (PCB-AHA), with whom we publish PHR, are pleased to make this special issue on “The Carceral West” free to read for the remainder of 2019.

Lytle Hernández also leads the Million Dollar Hoods Project, a research group that tracks the geographic and financial distribution of incarceration by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and Los Angeles Police Department.

The MacArthur Foundation said that “Lytle Hernández’s investigation of the intersecting histories of race, mass incarceration, immigration, and cross-border politics is deepening our understanding of how imprisonment has been used as a mechanism for social control in the United States.” More about the Fellowship Program can be read at the MacArthur Foundation website.

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