Participant Info
- First Name
- Melissa
- Last Name
- Borja
- Country
- United States
- State
- MI Michigan
- mborja@umich.edu
- Affiliation
- University of Michigan
- Website URL
- https://lsa.umich.edu/ac/people/faculty/mborja.html
- Keywords
- Religion, Immigration, Refugees, Asian American Studies, United States History
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
Melissa Borja is Assistant Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan, where she is a core faculty member in the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program. She researches migration, religion, politics, pluralism, and race in the United States and the Pacific World, with special attention to how religious beliefs and practices have developed in the context of the modern American state. Her book, Follow the New Way: Hmong Refugee Resettlement and the Practice of American Religious Pluralism (under contract, Harvard University Press) explores the religious dimensions of American refugee care—how governments have expanded capacity through partnerships with religious organizations and how refugee policies have shaped the religious lives of refugees. She earned a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and an A.B. from Harvard University. Before teaching at Michigan, she was Assistant Professor of History at the City University of New York.
- Recent Publications
Book Project
“Follow the New Way”: Hmong Refugee Resettlement and the Practice of American Religious Pluralism, 1976-2000. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (Under contract)
Articles
“The Government Alone Cannot Do the Total Job: Church-State Cooperation in International Refugee Crises.” In Political History Unbound, edited by Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason Williams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. (Forthcoming)
“Migrations and Modern American Religious Pluralism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History, edited by Paul Harvey and Kathryn Gin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
“Speaking of Spirits: Oral History, Religious Change, and the Seen and Unseen Worlds of Hmong Americans.” Oral History Review 44, no. 1.
Other Writing
“The Problem with Welcoming the Stranger.” Op-ed in The Anxious Bench. June 14, 2018. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2018/06/the-problem-with-welcoming-the-stranger/
“Refugee Resettlement Is a Church-State Enterprise.” Op-ed in Public Seminar. December 30, 2015. http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/12/refugee-resettlement-is-a-church-state-enterprise/#.V2nLXJMrKRs.
“When Welcoming the Stranger Was Not Just a Religious Value.” Op-ed in Religion Dispatches. November 25, 2015. http://religiondispatches.org/when-welcoming-the-stranger-was-not-just-a-religious-value/.
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- Country Focus
- United States
- Expertise by Geography
- United States
- Expertise by Chronology
- 20th century, 21st century
- Expertise by Topic
- Government, Migration & Immigration, Politics, Race, Religion
