Siobhan Somerville

Siobhan B. Somerville (Grad ’84) will publish Naturalization: A Queer Genealogy of US Citizenship, Race, and Sexuality with Duke University Press in September. In this wide-ranging analysis of the racial and sexual histories of citizen-making in the United States, Somerville shows how naturalization has long functioned as both a powerful metaphor and a contradictory state practice at the core of the U.S. settler colonial project. One critic calls it “a stunningly original work that radically alters our assumptions about the making of citizens.”