• Faculty

  • Victoria Hattam

    Professor of Politics

    Email
    hattamv@newschool.edu

    Office Location
    D - 6 East 16th Street

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    Victoria Hattam

    Profile

    Victoria Hattam is Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research. She received her PhD in Political Science from MIT. Hattam works in three research areas: US-Mexico border politics, design and production in the global economy, and visual and spatial politics. She is a member of the Multiple Mobilities Research Cluster. In 2018-19, Hattam co-directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar on Imagined Mobilities with Miriam Ticktin, Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, and Alex Aleinikoff. In 2020-21, Hattam will be a faculty fellow at the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought at The New School. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.


    Degrees Held

    PhD 1987, Massachusetts Institute of Technology


    Recent Publications

    Books

    Political Creativity: Reconfiguring Institutional Order and Change, University of Pennsylvania Press (2013). Ed., with Gerald Berk and Dennis Galvan. Co-authored introduction and conclusion with Berk and Galvan. 

    In the Shadow of Race: Jews, Latinos, and Immigrant Politics in the United States, University of Chicago Press (2007)

    • Awarded the Ralph Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association

    Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States. Princeton University Press (1993)   
     

    Selected Articles, Essays, Chapters

    "Material Imagineries," with Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, and Miriam Ticktin, Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 54 (2021): 153-163.

    "Beyond Sovereignty: Building Other Worlds," Journal of World Systems Research 27, 2 (2021): 383-89

    "Race Walls/Detroit," The Funambulist, 31 (September-October 2020): 8-10

    "Political Loved Ones," Women's Studies Quarterly 45(3-4), pp. 174-75 (2017).

    "What works," with Alyson Cole, Women's Studies Quarterly 45(3-4), pp. 15-33 (2017).

    "Imperial Designs: Remembering Vietnam at the US-Mexico Border Wall," Memory Studies 9, 1 (2016): 27-47

    Formative Mappings, Political Trappings: Racial and Ethnic Histories in the United States,” with Edmund Fong. Handbook of Racial and Ethnic Politics in the United States. Ed. David Leal, Taeku Lee, and Mark Sawyer. (Oxford University Press, article published online 2015)

    From Birmingham to Baghdad: The Micropolitics of Partisan Identification,” with Joseph Lowndes in Political Creativity: Reconfiguring Institutional Order and Change (2013). Ed. with Gerald Berk and Dennis Galvan. University of Pennsylvania Press.

    "Ethnicity & the Boundaries of Race: Rereading Directive 15," Daedalus (Winter 2005) 61-69

    "Ethnicity: An American Genealogy," in Nancy Foner and George M. Fredrickson (eds.), Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (Russell Sage, 2004)

    "Whiteness: Theorizing Race, Eliding Ethnicity," International Labor and Working-Class History (2001)


    Research Interests

    race, migration, and mobility; global political economy; visual, spatial, and material politics


    Awards And Honors

    2007
    Ralph Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association for In the Shadow of Race.

    2000-2001
    Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Sciences, Princeton.

    1997-98
    Visiting Scholar, Russell Sage Foundation.


    Current Courses

    Visual/Spatial/Material Pol
    GPOL 5148, Spring 2026

    Directed Dissertation Study
    GPOL 7991, Spring 2026

    Independent Study
    GPOL 6990, Spring 2026

    Visual/Spatial/Material Pol
    UTNS 6218, Spring 2026

    Future Courses

    Pol Econ Field Seminar
    GPOL 7005, Fall 2026

    Political Research Seminar
    GPOL 7004, Fall 2026

    Past Courses

    Directed Dissertation Study
    GPOL 7991, Fall 2025

    MA Seminar
    GPOL 5100, Fall 2025

    Political Imagination
    GPOL 6506, Fall 2025

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