Professor Kelly Lytle Hernández is a professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W. W. Norton, 2022). Her forthcoming book, Still Racist: U.S. Immigration Control since 1790, will be published by W. W. Norton in 2026. From 2017 to 2021, Professor Lytle Hernández served as the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. As director of the Bunche Center, she led an unprecedented fundraising campaign and launched the Bunche Fellows Program. Professor Lytle Hernandez was also the founding director of the Million Dollar Hoods (MDH) research initiative, which maps fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. She now serves as a principal advisor to MDH. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prizes Board.
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Awards
2010 Clements Prize for Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol
Honorable Mention, 2011 Lora Romero First Book Prize, American Studies Association
Honorable Mention, 2011 John Hope Franklin Book Prize, American Studies Association
Finalist, 2011 First Book Prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
2007 Oscar O. Winther Award for the best article to appear in the Western Historical Quarterly.
2007 Bolton-Kinnaird Award for best article on the Spanish borderlands.
