Faculty

Profile

Victoria Hattam is Professor and Chair of Politics at The New School for Social Research. She received her PhD in Political Science from MIT. Hattam works in three research areas: US-Mexico border politics, design and production in the global economy, and visual and spatial politics. She is a member of the Multiple Mobilities Research Cluster. In 2018-19, Hattam co-directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar on Imagined Mobilities with Miriam Ticktin, Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, and Alex Aleinikoff. In 2020-21, Hattam will be a faculty fellow at the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought at The New School. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Degrees Held

PhD 1987, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Recent Publications

Books

Political Creativity: Reconfiguring Institutional Order and Change, University of Pennsylvania Press (2013). Ed., with Gerald Berk and Dennis Galvan. Co-authored introduction and conclusion with Berk and Galvan. 

In the Shadow of Race: Jews, Latinos, and Immigrant Politics in the United States, University of Chicago Press (2007)

• Awarded the Ralph Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association

Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States. Princeton University Press (1993)   
 

Selected Articles, Essays, Chapters

"Material Imagineries," with Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, and Miriam Ticktin, Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 54 (2021): 153-163.

"Beyond Sovereignty: Building Other Worlds," Journal of World Systems Research 27, 2 (2021): 383-89

"Race Walls/Detroit," The Funambulist, 31 (September-October 2020): 8-10

"Political Loved Ones," Women's Studies Quarterly 45(3-4), pp. 174-75 (2017).

"What works," with Alyson Cole, Women's Studies Quarterly 45(3-4), pp. 15-33 (2017).

"Imperial Designs: Remembering Vietnam at the US-Mexico Border Wall," Memory Studies 9, 1 (2016): 27-47

“Formative Mappings, Political Trappings: Racial and Ethnic Histories in the United States,” with Edmund Fong. Handbook of Racial and Ethnic Politics in the United States. Ed. David Leal, Taeku Lee, and Mark Sawyer. (Oxford University Press, article published online 2015)

“From Birmingham to Baghdad: The Micropolitics of Partisan Identification,” with Joseph Lowndes in Political Creativity: Reconfiguring Institutional Order and Change (2013). Ed. with Gerald Berk and Dennis Galvan. University of Pennsylvania Press.

"Ethnicity & the Boundaries of Race: Rereading Directive 15," Daedalus (Winter 2005) 61-69

"Ethnicity: An American Genealogy," in Nancy Foner and George M. Fredrickson (eds.), Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (Russell Sage, 2004)

"Whiteness: Theorizing Race, Eliding Ethnicity," International Labor and Working-Class History (2001)

Research Interests

race, migration, and mobility; global political economy; visual, spatial, and material politics

Awards And Honors

2007
Ralph Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association for In the Shadow of Race.

2000-2001
Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Sciences, Princeton.

1997-98
Visiting Scholar, Russell Sage Foundation.