Emily Mitchell-Eaton

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Emily Mitchell-Eaton

Assistant Professor of Geography

Department/Office Information

Geography
306 Ho Science Center

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.

BA 2006, Smith College

MPA (Master of Public Administration) 2011, Syracuse University

PhD 2016, Syracuse University

Dr. Mitchell-Eaton's research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Association of Geographers, the Oakley Center for the Humanities at Williams College, the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, and the Institute for Human Geography. 

Peer-Reviewed Articles, Special Issues, and Book Chapters
2022. Mitchell-Eaton, E. and K. Coddington. Refusal and migration research: New possibilities for feminist geographical research on migration. In Power and Agency in Migration: Voiced from Displacement and Belonging, ed. Tamar Mayer. Routledge. 

2023. Mitchell-Eaton, E., R. Nisa, W. Attewell, and M. Kim (eds). Special issue: The Political Lives of Infrastructure. Radical History Review, Duke University Press. 

2021. Mitchell-Eaton, E. Imperial citizenship: Marshall Islanders and the Compact of Free Association. In Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Non-citizenship, ed. Catherine S. Ramírez. Rutgers. 

2020. Mitchell-Eaton, E. Postpartum geographies: Intersections of academic labor and care work. “Fertilities” special issue. Environment & Planning C: Politics & Space.

2019. Mitchell-Eaton, E. Grief as method: Topographies of grief, care, and fieldwork from Northwest Arkansas to New York and the Marshall Islands. Gender, Place & Culture, 26(10), 1438-1458.

2016. Loyd, J., Mitchell-Eaton, E., and Mountz, A. The militarization of islands and migration control: Tracing American empire through bases in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Political Geography, 53, 65-75.

2012. Coddington, K., Mountz, A., Loyd, J., Catania, T., and Mitchell-Eaton, E. Embodied Possibilities, Sovereign Geographies, and Island Detention: Negotiating the ‘right to have rights’ on Guam, Lampedusa, and Christmas Island. Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures, 6(2), 27-48. 

Essays, Book Reviews, and Other Publications

2021. Mitchell‐Eaton, E. No Island is an Island: COVID Exposure, Marshall Islanders, and Imperial Productions of Race and Remoteness. Society and Space Open Site.

2020. Mitchell-Eaton, E. Dying in Diaspora. Special feature: Networks of Solidarity During Crisis. EuropeNow. Council for European Studies, Columbia University.

2019. Mitchell-Eaton, E. Co-author for review forum, “Transpacific Geographies.” Review of Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas, Jinah Kim. Society & Space Open Site.

2019.  Mitchell-Eaton, E. Review of Nuevo South: Latinas/os, Asians, and the Remaking of Place, by Perla Guerrero. Great Plains Quarterly. 

2016. Mitchell-Eaton, E. Review of Immigrant protest: Politics, aesthetics, and everyday dissent. Edited by Marciniak, K., & Tyler, I. SUNY Press, 2014. H-Net.

2013. Mitchell‐Eaton, E. Review of Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo. By Rhacel Salazar Parreñas. Stanford University Press, 2011. International Migration Review, 47(4), 1042-1043.

  • GEOG 107: Is the Planet Doomed?
  • CORE C136: Pacific Islands and Diasporas
  • GEOG 211: Geographies of Nature, Economy, Society
  • GEOG 317: Mobility Justice
  • GEOG 321: Transnational Feminist Geography
  • GEOG/SOAN 318: International Migration, U.S. Immigration, and Immigrants
  • GEOG 401: Political Geographies of Empire, Colonialism, and Decolonization (senior seminar)
  • GEOG 401: Mobilities (senior seminar)