About

Lauren Duquette-Rury is Associate Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University. She was the Marilyn Williamson Endowed Chair for 2023-2024 and the 2022-2023 Career Development Chair. Her research and teaching focus on international migration, race and ethnicity, vigilantism in Mexico, democracy, development, and citizenship. She uses mixed methods in her research. In 2024 she was awarded the General Education Award for Excellence in Teaching and in 2023 the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Before joining Wayne State in 2018, she was Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCLA and UC President’s Post-doctoral Fellow.

Dr. Duquette-Rury publishes original research articles in leading sociology and interdisciplinary peer-review journals including the American Sociological Review, International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Social Science & Medicine, Latin American Research Review, and RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences among other outlets (see the Research section). Her first book, Exit and Voice: the Paradox of Cross-Border Politics in Mexico, was published with the University of California Press in 2020. The book is recipient of several awards from the American Sociological Association, the American Political Science Association, and the International Studies Association. She is currently working on her second book project, tentatively called, Naturalizing Under Threat: Citizenship in the Age of Immigration Enforcement funded by a Presidential Authority Grant in the Russell Sage Foundation Special Initiative on Immigrant Integration. In addition to the book project, she is preparing a collection of papers that explores how international migration shapes the emergence of self-defense vigilante forces in violent democracies (with Clarisa Pérez Armendaríz) and analyzing the effects of United States interior immigration enforcement and the carceral state on the health and wellness of Latino/as/x and Arab origin immigrants.

Funding for her research program has been provided by the Russell Sage Foundation and Carnegie Corporation, the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the National Academies, the Tinker Foundation, the University of Chicago, and at UCLA the Hellman Fellows Program, the Center for the Study of International Migration, the Center for American Politics and Public Policy, and the Academic Senate.

Currently, and with generous funding from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, she is curating an art exhibit “Citizenship and Belonging in the Age of Immigration Enforcement,” an aesthetic accompaniment to her second book project. Professor Duquette-Rury is eager to translate empirically based social science scholarship into visual representations of academic argument as a vehicle for storytelling and empathetic engagement with immigration related topics.

Duquette-Rury received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and my B.A. in International Studies (with honors) from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Before returning to academia, she worked as an economic analyst for the Economic Research Service at the USDA and Nathan Associates, an economic consulting firm in Washington, D.C..

Please contact her at the email address is: LDuquette [at] wayne. [edu]