Joseph Nevins

Associate professor of Geography

Joseph Nevins received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He studies territorial and social boundaries, imperialism and other forms of political violence, and matters of human rights, international law and social justice in the aftermath of mass atrocities. In doing so, he has conducted research in East Timor, Mexico, and the United States-Mexico border region. His courses include: Terrorism and Imperialism and the Making of the Modern World; Geographies of Mass Violence; and the United States-Mexico Border: Region, Place, and Process. He is the author of Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge, 2002), and A Not-so-distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor (Cornell University Press, 2005). He is currently working on a book on migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico boundary, and on a co-edited volume (with Dr. Nancy Peluso at University of California, Berkeley) on commodity production in Southeast Asia.

Recent academic journal publications

• “The Abuse of Space and the Redefinition of Ground Zero,”Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2005: 283-297.
• Co-authored with Mark Purcell, “Pushing the Boundary: State Restructuring, Regulation Theory, and the Case of U.S.-Mexico Border Enforcement in the 1990s,”Political Geography, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2005: 211-235.
• “Contesting the Boundaries of International Justice: State Countermapping and Offshore Resource Struggles Between Australia and East Timor,”Economic Geography, Vol. 80, No. 1, 2004: 1-22.
• “Thinking Out of Bounds: A Critical Analysis of Academic and Human Rights Writings on Migrant Deaths in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region,”Migraciones Internacionales, Vol. 2, No. 2, July-December 2003: 171-190.
• “Restitution over Coffee: Truth, Reconciliation and Environmental Violence in East Timor,”Political Geography, Vol. 22, No. 6, August 2003: 677-701.