As a feminist geographer interested in mobility and migration, Dr. Mitchell-Eaton explores how racial meanings, laws and policies, military infrastructures, and emotions travel through space and over time. In particular, her work examines how U.S. empire creates diasporas that stretch to unexpected places. Her book, New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming November 2024), explores comparative racial formations and forms of imperial citizenship, exposing the U.S. military’s sustained impacts in the Pacific Islands and on immigrant-receiving communities elsewhere. Dr. Mitchell-Eaton’s more recent work engages feminist theories and methods to map geographies of death, birth, care, and disability. One new project, Dying in Diaspora, traces circuits of grief and toxicity as experienced by people in nuclear diasporas. A second project, Geographies of Postpartum Care/Work in the Neoliberal U.S Academy, asks how postpartum rights in higher education can be struggled over—and won—using the frameworks of workers’ rights, reproductive justice, and disability justice.
Dr. Mitchell-Eaton earned a Ph.D. in Geography with a specialization in Women’s & Gender Studies. She also holds a Master in Public Administration and a BA in Latin American Studies and Portuguese & Brazilian Studies. Dr. Mitchell-Eaton joined Colgate from Williams College, where she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She has also been the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Non-citizenship at UC Santa Cruz, the McGill Fellow in International Studies at Trinity College, a visiting faculty member in human geography at Bennington College.