Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen

Role: Faculty-Postdoc Mentoring Coordinator
 
Biography: Leslie is a postdoctoral associate with the Council on African Studies and a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.  Her work focuses on the relationship between borders, race, and political economy between Africa and Europe. Leslie received her PhD in geography from Clark University in 2020. Her first book project, entitled Bordering Blackness: The Production of Race in the Morocco-EU Immigration Regime, draws on 11 months of ethnographic research among West and Central African migrants moving through or contained within Morocco, and was funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship. Her next project, tentatively titled Afrophobia in the African City: Migration, Violence, and the Political Economy of Difference, examines how urban space across the continent is being reshaped materially and socially as a result of intensifying migration control regimes, and how racial and ethnic difference is used to signify the legitimacy of particular claims to citizenship, mobility, and the right to the city.