Robert Irwin

Robert McKee Irwin (PhD Comparative Literature, New York University) is a founding member and Deputy Director of UC Davis's Global Migration Center. He is a specialist in border and migration studies, Mexican and Mexican American cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Since 2016, he is Principal Investigator and Coordinator of Humanizando la Deportación, a digital storyteller project that documents the human consequences of contemporary regimes of migration and border control in the United States and Mexico, the world's largest qualitative database of its kind. His research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Cal Humanities, UC MEXUS, and the UC Humanities Research Institute, among others. He is author of Mexican Masculinities (2003), editor of Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge: Building a Community Archive (2022), coeditor of Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos  (2012) and Humanizando la Deportación: narrativas digitales desde las calles de Tijuana (2023), as well as a special issue of Tabula Rasa titled "Complejos industriales fronterizos globales: genealogías, epistemologías, sexualidades" (2020). From 2015 to 2018, he codirected UC Davis's Mellon Initiative in Comparative Border Studies and is also former chair of the Graduate Group in Cultural Studies.