A. Naomi Paik

A. Naomi Paik is an interdisciplinary scholar of ethnic studies and feminist and gender studies. Her work examines the relationship between law and cultural politics, centering racism, state violence, and the limits of citizenship to secure rights and social equity. Her most recent book Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press), examines the long-developing criminalization of foreign-born people in the United States and the need for radical, abolitionist approaches to sanctuary. Her first book Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (UNC Press, 2016; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017) reads the testimonies of people imprisoned in camps by the U.S. state. It builds its narrative on a study of three camps and their detainees—Japanese Americans interned during World War II, who then fought for redress in the late 1980s; HIV-positive Haitian refugees detained at Guantánamo in the early 1990s; and Guantánamo’s enemy combatants from the War on Terror. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript on the most capacious meaning of “sanctuary for all” and developing another on military outsourcing. As a board member of the Radical History Review, she has co-edited three special issues of the journal—on “Militarism and Capitalism (Winter 2019), “Radical Histories of Sanctuary” (Fall 2019), and “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination” (Spring 2020). She has published articles in Social Text, Radical History Review, Cultural Dynamics, Race & Class, e-misferica, Humanity, The Conversation, The Funambulist, and the collection Guantánamo and American Empire. She is an associate professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where is also the IPRH-Mellon fellow in Legal Humanities (2019-2022), working to build the legal humanities at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research and teaching interests include comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration. http://www.naomipaik.com