Andrew Urban

Andrew Urban is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

Andrew Urban is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His forthcoming book, Brokering Servitude: Migration and Political Economies of Domesticity in the United States, 1850-1924 (NYU Press, 2017), examines how immigration policies, market regulation and cultural attitudes about servility shaped exchanges between capital and labor in American homes. A member of the Humanities Action Lab’s Steering Committee, Andy was also a founding member of the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, a coalition of faculty and students who curated a traveling museum exhibition about the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from its acquisition during the War of 1898 to its use as a detention center for Cuban and Haitian refugees seeking asylum in the US, and its central role in the post-9/11 “War on Terror.” Andy is currently a Term VI Visiting Professor at Deep Springs College in Inyo County, California.

A man sits on a crate to weigh vegetables in a field, black and white photo

A lesson from history about protecting migrant workers

What’s at stake when we talk about granting work authorization and giving jobs to refugees? Historian Andrew Urban takes us back to the 1940s and '50s, when Seabrook Farms took advantage of special labor programs to produce food.

A lesson from history about protecting migrant workers