Jacqueline Stevens

Jacqueline Stevens writes about political theories and practices of membership since antiquity.  Her current studies of deportation law enforcement engage the quotidian of government documents revealing contemporary illegalities, including the unlawful deportation of United States citizens from the United States.

She is the author of Reproducing the State (Princeton UP, 1999) and States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals (Columbia UP, 1999) as well as the co-editor with  Richard Falk and Balakrishnan Rajagopal of International Law and the Third World (Routledge, 2008).

Professor Stevens’ work has appeared in the journals Political Theory, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Political Philosophy, Social Text, Third World Quarterly, and many other scholarly venues, as well as in The Nation magazine and opinion pieces in The New York Times.  Her blog States Without Nations provides real-time original research findings of government misconduct based on narratives from people detained and deported as well as policies and other data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Stevens’s current project 200 Percent American is a nonfiction narrative of the unlawful deportation of a U.S. citizen to Mexico over his protests that he was born in North Carolina, spoke no Spanish, and had no relatives in Mexico.  The rendering of Mark Lyttle’s travels is influenced by Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote and will be attentive to the toponyms of North America and other textual and legal legacies of the conquistadors and British explorers and their descendants.

Stevens is a professor in the Political Science Department and member of the Legal Studies Advisory Board at Northwestern University.  Since 2012 she has been the founding director of the Deportation Research Clinic at the Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies, also at Northwestern.  For more information, please see her website.