Emily Mitchell-Eaton

Image of Emily Mitchell-Eaton
Visiting Faculty

Emily Mitchell-Eaton is a critical human geographer who studies how empires create diasporas that stretch to unexpected places. Her work focuses particularly on migration between the Pacific Islands and the U.S. South. As a geographer interested in mobility and migration, she explores how racial meanings, laws and policies, military infrastructures, and emotions travel through space and over time.


Biography

Mitchell-Eaton is a critical human geographer who studies imperial and militarized diasporas within the U.S. She has conducted field and archival research in Guåhan (Guam), Saipan, Tinian, Hawai’i, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on Pacific Islander migration, citizenship, race, and empire in two main areas: postcolonial migration policies and immigrant-led social movements. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled New Destinations of Empire: Imperial Migration from the Marshall Islands to Northwest Arkansas, explores new racial formations and forms of imperial citizenship, exposing the sustained legacies of the U.S. Pacific presence and their impacts on immigrant-receiving communities. Mitchell-Eaton is also at work on a third project that studies the geographies of grief, mourning, separation, and distance experienced by people living in diaspora. She has published in Political Geography, International Migration Review (IMR), H-Net: Migration, and Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures.

Mitchell-Eaton received her Ph.D. in Geography, with a certificate in Women's and Gender Studies, from Syracuse University in 2016. She also holds a Master in Public Administration (MPA) from Syracuse University (‘11) and a BA in Latin American Studies and Portuguese & Brazilian Studies from Smith College (’06). Mitchell-Eaton has previously held positions as the McGill Visiting Assistant Professor in International Studies at Trinity College (2017-2018) and the Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Non-citizenship at the University of California at Santa Cruz (2016-2017). She was a visiting faculty member at Bennington from Fall 2018 through Spring 2020.