Faculty

Profile

Alexandra Délano Alonso is Professor of Global Studies at The New School and Eugene M. Lang Professor for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring. She received her doctorate in International Relations from the University of Oxford. Her work explores the connections between academia, policy and activism, identifying spaces where bottom-up and top-down interactions across different levels and actors produce transformative practices, policies, and spaces to address the inequalities underlying the causes of the forced displacement and the exclusion of migrants with precarious status. She also examines and participates in activism across borders through networks of migrant organizations, mutual aid, and memorial projects as a response and an alternative to existing policies and systems in the struggles for justice.

She is co-founder and former co-director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility with Miriam Ticktin, as well as a member of The New School's Sanctuary Working Group.

Professor Délano Alonso's current research focuses on transformative practices of solidarity across the Central America-Mexico-US migration corridor.

Born and raised in Mexico, her experience living across borders and her mixed origins as the granddaughter of immigrants have shaped her research, teaching, mentoring, university service and activism.

Recent Publications

Professor Délano Alonso's publications include the book From Here and There: Diaspora Policies, Integration and Social Rights Beyond Borders (Oxford University Press, 2018) and the book Mexico and Its Diaspora in the United States: Policies of Emigration since 1848 (Cambridge University Press, 2011; El Colegio de México, 2014), co-winner of the William LeoGrande Prize for the best book on US-Latin America Relations. 

She is also co-editor of the special issue on the Microfoundations of Disapora Politics (with Harris Mylonas, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2019) and the special issue on Borders and the Politics of Mourning (with Benjamin Nienass, Social Research,Summer 2016).

Her most recent books include:

New Narratives on the Peopling of America: Immigration, Race and Dispossession, co-edited with Alex Aleinikoff (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024)

Las luchas por la memoria contra las violencias en México, co-edited with Benjamin Nienass, Alicia de los Ríos Merino and María De Vecchi Gerli (El Colegio de México, 2024)

Recent articles and essays:

Memory Protest and Contested Time: The Antimonumentos Route in Mexico City (Sociologica, 2023)  

Antes y después de Juárez (Gatopardo, 2023)

Performances and Appearances

“Step Up, Rise Up, and Reimagine a Radically Just World”, A Commencement Address to the Graduates of Eugene Lang College, May 18, 2017. 

Research Interests

migration, diasporas, transnationalism, memory, sanctuary, solidarity, Mexico

Awards And Honors

Fulbright-Carlos Rico Award for North American Studies, 2014-15. 

William M. LeoGrande Prize for Best Book on U.S.-Latin American Relations. Co-winner, American University, February 2013.

Distinguished University Teaching Award, The New School, June 2012.

Faculty Advisor Excellence Award, The New School, May 2012.