Michael Innis-Jimenez
- Title: Professor
- Department: American Studies
- College: Arts & Sciences
Bio
Michael Innis-Jiménez is a professor of American Studies who has been at UA since 2008. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Iowa. His public-facing work has focused on contributing to the community through organizations and projects that recognize the importance of diversity and inclusion. This includes ongoing roles as a member of the Alabama State Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights and as a member of the community advisory boards for a local study on rural Latina adolescent sexual health and healthcare. He has also served on boards and committees focused on diversifying the academy, including as chair for the diversity and inclusion committees of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association.
Innis-Jimenez’s research interests include urban race and ethnicity, ethnic food and foodways, migration and immigration to and within the U.S., labor, and the racialization of Latinx communities. More specifically, his historical research focuses on urban Mexican and Mexican- American communities in the Midwest and South. His book projects include Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago (NYUP, 2013), Made in Chicago: Mexican Food, Tourism, and Cultural Identity (in progress and under contract with the University of Texas Press), and The Latino South: A History of Migration and Race in Pursuit of the American | Dream (in progress). His book chapters include: “Beyond the Baseball Diamond and Basketball Court: Organized Leisure in Interwar Mexican Chicago” in More Than Just Peloteros: Sport and U.S. Latino Communities, ed. Jorge Iber (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2015); “Engaged Learning in the Anti-Immigrant South: Building Bridges in a Hostile Environment” in Frictions of Daily Life: Class, Community, & the Challenge of Engaged Scholarship, ed. Dennis Deslippe, Eric Fure-Slocum, and John McKerley. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016); “Chicago Steel, Latino Workers, and Midwestern Environmental History” in The Latino Midwest Reader, ed. Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, and Claire F. Fox. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, June 2017); and “No Cheerful Patches of Green’: Pollution, the Built Environment, and Early Twentieth-Century Mexican Community on the Far Southeast Side of Chicago.” in City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History, ed. William Barnet, Kathy Brosnan, and Ann Keating. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), and “Mexican Food, Cultural Tourism, and the Ethnic Restaurant in the Urban Environment” in Andrew K Sandoval-Strausz, editor. MetropoLatinx, (University of Chicago Press, under review).