Katherine Unterman
My work examines the comparative histories of international borders, especially the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders. I try to bring a cultural and legal perspective to a subject that seems inherently political.
My dissertation, “Continental Fugitives: U.S. Extradition North and South,” explores the transnational circulation of people, capital, goods, and ideas throughout North America in the nineteenth century. Specifically, I focus on American efforts to exercise legal authority beyond U.S. borders and popular attempts to resist state legislation by crossing borders. As such, it is a tri-national story, involving archival work in Canada and Mexico as well as the United States. I use extradition cases as lens to examine how cross-border flows were regulated even before the era of immigration restriction. At the heart of my dissertation is the claim that the much-studied U.S.-Mexico border cannot be fully understood without a concurrent examination of parallel phenomena at the U.S.-Canada border.
My advisor is John Mack Faragher, and the other members of my committee are Seth Fein, Matthew Frye Jacobson, and David Blight. I also did an orals field in Modern Latin America with Gil Joseph. Originally from Los Angeles, I am currently living in Washington, DC.
