Professor Josephina Saldaña-Portilla of New York University examined how the response of American liberals to undocumented immigrants has affected policy during the Obama and Trump presidencies, in this year’s annual Bud Shaw Lecture.

The annual lecture is held in honor of Dickinson graduate, Bud Shaw ’80. Shaw turned to activism after being diagnosed with HIV post-graduation. When he passed away in 1992, Shaw left a grant to the American studies department intended to support the hosting of influential speakers and scholars in the field.

This year, the department hosted Josephina Saldaña-Portilla, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. On Wednesday, Feb. 21, she spoke about her ongoing research in a lecture entitled Whose Citizenship, Whose Security? Saldaña-Portilla’s research focuses primarily on women and the roles that gender and sexuality play in the increased rates of Central American immigration.

Saldaña-Portilla’s talk started a conversation amongst the attendees. “I loved the lecture,” said Killian Kueny ’19. “Personally, I think that Dickinson does an incredible job providing its students with opportunities to learn more about topics that they might not know too much about,” said Kueny. “While I knew that women faced a substantial amount of danger in the immigration process, legal or illegal, I was unaware of the extent to which they were coerced to provide for gangs or targeted at boarder control stops.”

Kueny was also shocked by “the lasting impact that relatively newly enacted immigration laws [have on] our society and the ability of immigrant families to further themselves within American society.” Kuney added, “For me, the Shaw lecture stood not only as an opportunity to learn more about the immigration policies that plague our society, but also as an opportunity to evoke empathy towards an issue that is often desensitized and dehumanized.”

The lecture was on Wednesday, Feb. 21 in Althouse 106 and had 45 attendees. According to Associate Professor of American studies Cotten Seiler, the grant has allowed the department the opportunity to host speakers that are “established and influential scholar[s] in the field of American studies,” whose work addresses contemporary issues of race, gender, sexuality, and representation.