Keohane Distinguished Lecture Series: Half a Loaf: Reform and the Whites-Only Immigration Régime, 1965 to 2025

Join us for a public lecture by historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, the 2025-26 Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, Professor Hernández will discuss topics stemming from her forthcoming book, Still Racist: U.S. Immigration Control since 1790, which will be published by W. W. Norton in 2026.

The lecture will begin at 5:30pm, to be followed at 6:30pm by a reception in Dr. Hernández’s honor.

Registration is required to attend this talk.

The Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professorship brings prominent scholars to UNC Chapel Hill and Duke for a one-year period, during which they deliver a lecture series and engage students and faculty around areas of shared interest to both institutions. Ultimately, the program is designed to energize new scholarly connections between Duke and UNC. This lecture is organized by the Duke Center for Documentary Studies and Department of History.

Professor Kelly Lytle Hernández holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W. W. Norton, 2022). She is the founding director of the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which maps fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prizes Board.