Nathalia Justo

Affiliation: Government and Legal Studies

Visiting Assistant Professor of Government

I am a Visiting Instructor in Government in the Department of Government and Legal Studies at Bowdoin College. I am finishing my Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University, with an emphasis on International Relations and Political Theory in July 2023. I am a teacher-scholar with expertise in ethics, international law, migration and citizenship, history and international organizations, and international political economy.

With my current interdisciplinary research project, I want to contribute to ongoing debates on the shortcomings of current legal categories of protection for non-citizens by exploring to which extent they owe their potentialities and limits to notions of deservingness that sideline broader articulations of political responsibility. I take an ethnographic approach to the processes of construction of the categories of the stateless, refugee, and temporary protected status (TPS) through UN archival work and fieldwork with communities of rights claimants.

As part of my professional development, I participated in the SSRC/NU Dissertation Development Program (Summer 2018); completed Northwestern’s Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching Teaching Certificate (2018-2019); participated in the Graduate Writing Place writing groups (2019-2021); and joined the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs 2020-2021 cohort of the Global Impacts program. Before starting my Ph.D., I worked for three years in higher education administration. I love incorporating lessons from the Improv course I took at Second City in my teaching.

For more information, please visit nathaliajusto.com.