Professor Camilla Hawthorne

Camilla Hawthorne (she/they) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a faculty affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center, the Italian Studies Program, the Legal Studies Program, and the Visualizing Abolition Studies Certificate Program at UCSC. Camilla is co-founder of the UCSC Black Geographies Lab, past Chair of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers, and also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Her work addresses the racial politics of migration and citizenship and the insurgent geographies of the Black Mediterranean. Camilla is co-editor of the The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023), and is author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022; translated into Italian as Razza e cittadinanza. Frontiere contese e contestate nel Mediterraneo nero, Astarte Edizioni, 2023).

In 2020, she was named as one of the national Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera‘s 110 "Women of the Year" for her work on the Black diaspora in Italy; she was also awarded the Leonardo Da Vinci Society Award in Humanities/Social Sciences in 2021 and the Young Investigator Award for Innovation in the Study of Italian Culture in 2022, both from the Italian Scientists & Scholars in North American Foundation. Camilla received her PhD in Geography and Science & Technology Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018.