Faculty Directory

Summary of Expertise

I am Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the UC Santa Cruz. My work addresses the racial politics of migration and citizenship and the insurgent, abolition geographies of the Black Mediterranean. I am co-editor of The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023), and author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022), translated into Italian as Razza e cittadinanza. Frontiere contese e contestate nel Mediterraneo nero (Astarte Edizioni, 2023).

I am founder and co-director of the UCSC Black Geographies Lab. I am also a faculty affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center, the Italian Studies Program, the Legal Studies Program, and the Visualizing Abolition Studies Certificate Program. Beyond UC Santa Cruz, I am Past Chair of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers, and I serve on the editorial boards of the journals Environment and Planning D: Society & Space and California Italian Studies. 

I am project manager and faculty member of the Black Europe Summer School, a two-week intensive course on citizenship, race, and the Black diaspora in Europe that is held for two weeks each summer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In addition, I continue to collaborate with activist collectives in the United States and Europe working at the intersection of anti-Blackness and xenophobia.

Research Interests

My current project, Black Mediterranean Geographies of Abolition: Toward a Relational Theorization of Global Racisms, explores the connections between Black liberation struggles in southern Europe and North America. It does so through the development of a relational theoretical framework for understanding not only the links between antiracist political movements across borders, but also the intertwined histories of racism and colonialism that defy methodological nationalisms and bounded geographical comparisons. From a conjunctural analysis of U.S. Reconstruction and the Italian Risorgimento staged via a critical dialogue between Du Bois and Gramsci, to a study of circulations between prison abolitionists in the United States and Frontex abolitionists in Italy, this book weaves an interconnected, global story about abolition geographies stretching across the Black Mediterranean and Black Atlantic diasporas. These diasporas are connected through histories of racial capitalist dispossession, technologies of displacement and confinement, and creative strategies of resistance and world-building.

Biography, Education and Training

• PhD: Geography and Science and Technology Studies, UC Berkeley (2018)
• MPA: Brown University (2010)
• AB: International Relations and Africana Studies, Brown University (2009)

Honors, Awards and Grants

• Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship (2024-2025)
• Italian Scientists and Scholars in North America Foundation Young Investigator Award for Innovation in the Study of Italian Culture (2022)
• Leonardo da Vinci Humanities Award for Early Career Researchers/Scholars (2021)
• “Woman of the Year,” Corriere della Sera (2020)
• UC Santa Cruz Humanities Institute Research Cluster Grant (2020)
• UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation Building Belonging Grant (2020)
• Hellman Foundation Fellowship (2020)
• UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation Book Manuscript Accelerator Grant (2020)
• UCHRI Short-Term Research Residence Award (Co-PI with Jennifer Kelly) (2019)
• Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship (2014)
• Eugene Cota-Robles Graduate Fellowship (2012)
• Presidential Management Fellowship (2010)
• Liman Public Interest Law Fellowship (2009)

Selected Publications

Books 

• The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity, eds. Camilla Hawthorne and Jovan Scott Lewis (Duke University Press, 2023). 
• Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Ithacha: Cornell University Press, 2022).
• The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship, eds. Gabriele Proglio, Ida Danewid, Vivian Gerrand, Mackda Ghebremarian Tesfau, Giuseppe Grimaldi, Camilla Hawthorne, Angelica Pesarini, Timothy Raeymaekers, and Khalil Saucier (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Journal Articles

• Camilla Hawthorne. “Toward a Relational Theorization of Racisms.” Ethnic and Racial Studies (2023): 1-9. 
• Camilla Hawthorne. “Black Mediterranean geographies: Translation and the mattering of Black life in Italy,” Gender, Place & Culture (2022), 1–24.
• “Why abolition now? Reflecting on 2020 with scholar-activists Brianna Byrd, Camilla Hawthorne, and Dylan Rodriguez,” Interface 13, no. 2 (2021): 246–262. 
• Camilla Hawthorne. "Making Italy: Afro-Italian entrepreneurs and the racial boundaries of citizenship." Social & Cultural Geography 22, no. 5 (2021): 704-724.
• Camilla Hawthorne. "Black Matters are Spatial Matters: Black Geographies for the Twenty-First Century." Geography Compass (2019): 1-13.
• Camilla Hawthorne and Kaily Heitz. “Commentary: A Seat at the Table? Reflections on Black Geographies and the Limits of Dialogue.” Dialogues in Human Geography 8, no. 2 (2018): 148-151. 
• Annalisa Frisina and Camilla Hawthorne. “Italians with veils and Afros: gender, beauty, and the everyday anti-racism of the daughters of immigrants in Italy.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44, no. 5 (2018; online 2017): 718-735.
• Ilaria Giglioli, Camilla Hawthorne, and Alessandro Tiberio. “Introduction to the special issue ‘Rethinking “Europe” through an ethnography of its borderlands, peripheries and margins.” Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa no. 3 (September–December), 2017: 335-338.
• Camilla Hawthorne. “In Search of Black Italia: Notes on Race, Belonging, and Activism in the Black Mediterranean.” Transition 123 (2017): 152–174. 
• Camilla Hawthorne and Brittany Meché. “Making Room for Black Feminist Praxis in Geography.” Society and Space, September 30. 

 Journal Special Issues Edited

• Camilla Hawthorne and Jennifer Kelly, eds. “Border Regimes and Resistance  In Global Perspective.” Critical  Ethnic Studies 6, no. 2  (2021).
• Ilaria Giglioli, Camilla Hawthorne, and Alessandro Tiberio, “Rethinking ‘Europe’ through an ethnography of its borderlands, peripheries and margins.” Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa no. 3 (September–December), 2017.

Book Chapters

• Camilla Hawthorne. “L’Italia Meticcia? The Black Mediterranean and the Racial Cartographies of Citizenship.” In The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship, eds. Gabriele Proglio et al., 169-198 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
• Camilla Hawthorne. "Prefazione." In Future: Il domani narrato dalle voci di oggi, ed. Igiaba Scego, 21-32 (Florence: Effequ, 2019).
• Camilla Hawthorne. "Suprematismo." In Lessico della crisi e del possible: Cento lemmi per praticare il presente, ed. Fabrice Dubosc, 275-277 (Turin: Edizioni SEB27, 2019).
• Camilla Hawthorne. “Dangerous Networks: Internet Regulations as Racial Border Control in Italy.” In digitalSTS: A Fieldguide for Science and Technology Studies, eds. Janet Vertesi and David Ribes, 178-197 (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2019).
• Annalisa Frisina and Camilla Hawthorne. “Riconoscersi nel successo di Evelyne, lottare nel ricordo di Abba. Un viaggio tra le icone nere dei figli delle migrazioni in Italia.” In A fior di pelle. Razza e visualità, eds. Elisa Bordin and Stefano Bosco, 179–195. Verona: Ombre Corte, 2017).
• Annalisa Frisina and Camilla Hawthorne. “Sulle pratiche estetiche antirazziste delle figlie delle migrazioni.” In Il Colore della nazione, ed. Gaia Giuliani, 200–214. Milan: Mondadori Education, 2015.

Selected Recordings

Camilla Hawthorne's Fall 2020 Welcome