Professor Yuridia Ramírez received a 2025 Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award from the Institute of Citizens & Scholars. The award comes with a $20,000 stipend to support her research.
The award recognizes scholars who have demonstrated impressive scholarship, service, and teaching early in the tenure process. The selection committee said they were “impressed by her scholarly accomplishments, as well as her commitment to supporting students, strengthening her field and institution, and building a more inclusive academic community.”
Ramírez is a historian of the modern United States who specializes in migration, Latinxs, labor, oral history, and indigeneity. She is currently working on her first book, tentatively titled Indigeneity on the Move: Transborder Politics from Michoacán to North Carolina, a historic and interdisciplinary analysis of a diasporic Indigenous community and their transforming sense of indigeneity. She has published chapters in Faith and Power: Latina/o Religious Politics Since 1945 (NYU Press), and in Migration, Identity, and Belonging: Defining Borders and Boundaries of the Homeland (Routledge). She has also published in the Journal of Southern History and Radical History Review.
Ramírez has personal experience with and an intellectual commitment to migrant workers and their families. She has worked as a community organizer in North Carolina with United We Dream and has organized in refugee and immigrant communities in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Durham, North Carolina; and now Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. She has also worked with K-12 students, young adults, and families, to think critically about racism, violence, and injustice, while developing a vision for a collective community.