Helen B. Marrow, Ph.D.
I am a Professor of Sociology at Tufts University, where I teach courses on introductory sociology, migration and race, the politics and media of migration, Latinx sociology, and research methods (with a focus on ethnography, in-depth interviewing, and content analysis of media). I am a collaborating faculty member with Tufts’ Department of Latin American Studies (LAS), and in the past have also served as an Interim Director of the Program in Latino Studies. In May 2019, I was awarded the Lillian and Joseph Leibner Award for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring, and in 2020-22, I served as Co-Chair of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and Engineering.
Beyond Tufts, I have recently served as Chair-Elect (2020-21), Chair (2021-22), and Past Chair (2022-23) of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association. In the past, I have also been a Visiting Researcher at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, plus served as Co-Leader of the Boston-area Scholars Strategy Network (2015-16), an organization of scholars that seeks to make the democratic and policy implications of academic research more broadly accessible to the media, politicians, and American public.
My research and writing focus on immigration, race and ethnicity, social class, health, and inequality and social policy. My first sole-authored book, New Destination Dreaming: Immigration, Race, and Legal Status in the Rural American South (Stanford University Press, 2011) drew on 129 in-depth interviews and a year of participant observation to understand how Hispanic/Latino newcomers were being incorporated into or excluded from economic, social, institutional, and political life in “new immigrant destinations” of the rural U.S. South in the early 2000s. For this and other journal articles on the same topic, I was awarded the 2008 Best Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association, the 2011 Distinguished Contribution to Research Article Award from the Latino/a Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, and an Honorable Mention for the 2014 Distinguished Early Career Award from the Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities of the American Sociological Association. More recently, I have written several new book chapters and journal articles where I attempt to gauge how the restrictive turn in anti-immigrant sentiment and immigration enforcement since 2005 has impacted immigrants’ experiences and opportunities in new destinations, especially the South.
Other parts of my research have been published in various places. A paper on the spatial patterning of Latino, Asian, and Muslim immigrants’ perceptions of discrimination in the U.S. was we published in Politics, Groups, and Identities (2016) (with co-authors Daniel Hopkins, Jonathan Mummolo, Victoria M. Esses, Cheryl R. Kaiser, and Monica McDermott). A paper on heterogeneity in Mexican Americans’ assimilation patterns was published in Ethnic and Racial Studies (2014) (with co authors Richard D. Alba and Tomás R. Jiménez). Results from two earlier projects — the first on second-generation Brazilians’ racial and ethnic identities in the United States, and the second on first-generation Latin Americans’ racial and ethnic identities in Ireland — were both published in Ethnicities. Along with sociologist Mary C. Waters and historian Reed Ueda, I am co-editor of The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965 (Harvard University Press, 2007), a comprehensive guide to major themes in U.S. immigration research and to the national-origin immigrant groups present in the U.S. at the turn of the 21st century. Feel free to browse my publications pages for details and links to ones that interest you.
In the arena of health, my 2009 case study of the effects of San Francisco’s inclusive policy context toward unauthorized immigrants in health care was published in two special volumes on immigration and health in Ethnic and Racial Studies (2012) and Social Science & Medicine (2012). For that scholarship, I was awarded the 2010 Best Paper Award from the First Annual Research Training Workshop of the University of California Centers of Expertise on Migration and Health (COEMH). Later, I drew on that case study to team up with fellow sociologist and RWJ Health Policy alum Tiffany Joseph (Northeastern University) to analyze the implications of national (the Affordable Care Act) versus state and local (San Francisco and Massachusetts) health care reform policies on unauthorized immigrants’ access to care. That collaboration was published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2015) and awarded the 2017 Donald W. Light Award for the Applied or Public Practice of Medical Sociology from the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. In June 2017, Prof. Joseph and I were also proud to announce a special edited Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies issue featuring several interdisciplinary scholars’ work on the health of immigrants and ethnoracial minority groups during the early period of ACA implementation between 2010 and 2016.
My main focus today is a large interdisciplinary project funded by the Russell Sage and Carnegie Foundations, entitled “The Study of Immigrants and Nonimmigrants in Atlanta and Philadelphia (SINAP).” In collaboration with political scientist Michael Jones-Correa (University of Pennsylvania), sociologist Dina Okamoto (Indiana University), and social psychologist Linda Tropp (University of Massachusetts-Amherst), we are using original survey data, in-depth interviews, and short field observations to examine patterns of cultural contact and threat among two U.S.-born groups (Whites and Blacks) and two foreign-born groups (Mexican and South Asian Indian immigrants) in metropolitan Philadelphia and Atlanta to investigate how immigration-driven diversity shapes patterns of intergroup threat, contact, trust, receptivity, and civic participation. We have now published six journal articles from this project: the first on how contact experiences shape welcoming among these four groups (Social Psychology Quarterly, 2018), the second on how contact and welcoming shape immigrants’ American identifications and attachments to the polity (RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of Social Science, 2018), the third on how contact between U.S.-born groups shapes their attitudes toward immigrants (Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 2019), the fourth on how feeling welcomed by the U.S.-born shapes the immigrants’ trust in Whites and Blacks, plus their levels of civic engagement (Annals of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2020), the fifth on how skin tone shapes Mexican immigrants’ perceptions of discrimination (Social Psychology Quarterly, 2022), and the sixth on how South Asian Indian immigrants perceive and interpret their experiences of discrimination in a relational context (Social Psychology Quarterly, 2023). We continue to work on writing up results from this study in other scholarly journal articles and a long-term book manuscript, tentatively entitled Encountering Diversity: Blacks, Whites, and Immigrants in Segregated U.S. Cities. Along the way, we have also presented results publicly at places such as the 2015 National Immigrant Integration Conference, two stakeholder meetings in Atlanta and Philadelphia in Fall 2016, and academic conferences such as IMISCOE in Europe.
In a second exciting collaborative venture, I am also working with political scientist Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels (University of Kent at Brussels) to analyze results from our nationally-representative pilot survey and follow-up interviews that we fielded in the summer of 2014, through which we are modeling the selectivity and characteristics of Americans who reveal some aspiration to live abroad. This is one of the first studies to examine Americans’ “migration aspirations” from the point of origin, thereby complementing the growing literature on Americans who have already moved abroad. Our first article, based on our survey data, is now available in the International Migration Review. We are currently working on writing up results from the qualitative interviews, plus analyzing new results a follow-up survey we fielded in the summer of 2019, which allows us to explore how Americans’ aspirations to live abroad shifted (or not) in the wake of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, dependent on their political ideology, strength of national attachment, and levels of civic and political engagement. (See a recent writeup in the Washington Post featuring some of our study’s findings here.) Now, we are in the midst of plans to field an expanded third wave of our survey in the fall of 2024, through the Cooperative Election Study (CES), with gracious support from Faculty Research Fund and MUSE fellowship funding here at Tufts.
Prior to coming to Tufts, I served as a Robert Wood Johnson Postdoctoral Scholar in Health Policy (UC-Berkeley and UCSF, 2008-10); a European Network on Inequality Research Fellow (Harvard University and University College Dublin, 2006); a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow (Harvard University, 2002-04 and 2005-06); a Research Fellow with the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy (Harvard University, 2001-04); and a Foreign Language and Area Studies Summer Fellow with the U.S. Department of Education (Brazil, 2002). I received my M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University, where I received four Certificates of Distinctions in Teaching, and my A.B. (summa cum laude) in Sociology and Latin American Studies from Princeton University, where I received a President’s Award for Academic Achievement in 1998.
Publicly, I have been interviewed and quoted in Aeon, The Atlantic, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the Miami Herald, National Public Radio, Harvard Magazine, Tufts Now, The Society Pages, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, and a video documentary on immigration on YouTube. I have also authored columns on the economic and fiscal impacts of unauthorized immigration in American communities in Contexts, the potential effects of repealing Obamacare in North Carolina in the Raleigh News and Observer, and the importance of immigration reform to Mexican American assimilation in the Los Angeles Times (with Tomás R. Jiménez) and the Raleigh News and Observer. I am currently a member of the Scholars Strategy Network (Boston chapter) and a faculty affiliate of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University. Previously at Tufts, I was designated one of the university’s Neubauer Faculty Fellows in 2011-12 and one of its Tisch Faculty Fellows in 2014-15. Feel free to browse my “Me in the News” page for details and links to ones that interest you.
I grew up — and continue to be proud of my roots — in eastern North Carolina. I now live in the Boston area with my husband and three children. Once upon a time I liked to cook, do yoga, hang out with friends and family, watch TV, and travel. But now all my “spare” time as a working mom means remembering to go to the grocery store while trying to prioritize family, students, and a bit of writing each day. I speak fluent English and read/write/speak proficient Spanish and Portuguese (unfortunately those learn-it-yourself French tapes and that one night course in elementary Mandarin never stuck). I’ve studied, worked, and/or volunteered in Belize, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Ireland, Mexico, and Spain.