Kelly Lytle Hernández

Kelly Lytle Hernández holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W. W. Norton, 2022). Her forthcoming book, Still Racist: U.S. Immigration Control since 1790, will be published by W. W. Norton in 2026. She is the founding director of the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which maps fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize Board. She holds the 2025-26 Nannerl Keohane Visiting Professorship at Duke University.

BIO January 2026