Evan Taparata is an Assistant Professor of the 20th Century History of the United States in the World. His research and teaching interests revolve around migration, belonging, law, and empire in the 19th and 20th century United States. He is a member of the Migration Scholar Collaborative and has contributed to numerous digital public history projects, including the Humanities Action Lab’s “States of Incarceration” initiative and the #ImmigrationSyllabus. His scholarship has been published in the Journal of American Ethnic History, PublicBooks.org, and he has been a regular contributor to PublicRadioInternational.org both as a freelance writer and as the Interim Social Media Editor for PRI’s daily radio broadcast “The World.”

Taparata is currently at work on his first book manuscript, tentatively titled “Refuge Crisis: The Making of the United States Refugee Regime.” In contrast to histories that date American refugee policy to the mid-twentieth century, Taparata traces refugee policy’s origins to the nation’s founding era. In doing so, his book explores the tensions inherent in what it has meant in practice for the United States—a nation founded on values of liberty and equality for all yet built on systemic forms of dispossession and unfreedom like settler colonialism, slavery, and anti- immigrant xenophobia—to be and claim itself as a place of refuge. “Refuge Crisis” shows how these seemingly disparate formations of imperial power manifested a constellation of policies, administrative decrees, military orders, treaty clauses, and ad hoc decisions that together cohered in the creation of a United States Refugee Regime that offers refuge conditionally, strategically, and in ways that reinforce ideas about who does and does not “belong.” Focusing our attention away from representations of ongoing global displacement as a “refugee crisis,” Taparata insists that the United States has long been in a refuge crisis in which policymakers have regularly prioritized domestic and foreign policy interests over the needs of displaced and persecuted peoples—and that the U.S. has thus long struggled to live up to its aspirational values of liberty, refuge, and asylum.

Prior to joining UCCS, Taparata was a 2020-2022 Postdoctoral Fellow in Global American Studies at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, where he taught in the Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights Program. From 2018-2020 he was the Jack Miller Center Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy. He is a proud community college graduate, among the first in his family to go to college, and the first in his extended family to earn a PhD.

• U.S. in the World
• 19th and 20th Century United States History
• Migration
• Histories of U.S. Empire
• Legal History
• Citizenship and Belonging
• Public History and Digital Humanities

• Wallace Johnson Program for First Book Authors, American Society for Legal History, 2019-2020
• Best Dissertation Award in the Arts and Humanities, University of Minnesota Graduate School, May 2019
• Honorable Mention, Outstanding Dissertation Award, Immigration and Ethnic History Society, April 2019
• Jefferson Scholars Foundation National Fellowship, University of Virginia, 2017-2018
• Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, University of Minnesota, 2016-2017
• John Higham Research Fellowship, Organization of American Historians, 2016
• Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Humanities Without Walls Consortium Summer Workshop, Chicago, IL, July 18-August 5, 2016
• Fellow, J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, June 14-27, 2015
• Cromwell Research Fellowship, William Nelson Cromwell Foundation and American Society for Legal History, 2015
• Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Short-Term Research Fellowship, 2015

• PhD, University of Minnesota, History, 2018
• MA, University of Minnesota, History, 2013
• BA, Rutgers University, History and English, 2009
• AA, Brookdale Community College, Liberal Studies, 2006

Evan Taparata, Ph.D