Professor Yuridia Ramírez has been named a Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professor Scholar (LEAP) by the College of LAS. The LEAP award’s goal is to foster excellence and recognize the impact assistant professors have in the College of LAS. Those honored are decided by scholarly productivity and contributions to the college’s educational mission. That includes research, teaching, service, and commitment to fostering an inclusive and equitable scholarly 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.