OAH Distinguished Lecturer Profile

Michael Innis-Jiménez is Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama. He has also served as a consultant and team member with the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute's Latino New South Project and as a consultant with the lead museum of the project's consortium, the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina. His research interests include the study of early Mexican and Mexican-American migrations to the U.S. Midwest and South. He is the author of Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago (2013), which examines how the fortunes of Mexicans in South Chicago were linked to the built environment. He is currently at work on two book projects: "Made in Chicago: Mexican Food, Tourism, and Cultural Identity" examines the role of food in the cultural production and everyday lives of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in early twentieth-century Chicago; "The Latino South: A History of Migration and Race in Pursuit of the American Dream" puts the twenty-first-century anti-immigration waves in the American South in historical perspective.