Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen

Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen is a Lecturer with the Council on African Studies and Council on Middle East Studies.  She is a feminist geographer whose work focuses on the relationship between borders, race, and political economy between Africa and Europe. Leslie received her PhD in geography from Clark University in 2019. Her first book project, entitled Bordering Blackness: The Production of Race in the Morocco-EU Immigration Regime, draws on 11 months of ethnographic research among West and Central African migrants moving through or contained within Morocco, and was funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship. Her next project, tentatively titled Afrophobia in the African City: Migration, Violence, and the Political Economy of Difference, examines how urban space across the continent is being reshaped materially and socially as a result of intensifying migration control regimes, and how racial and ethnic difference is used to signify the legitimacy of particular claims to citizenship, mobility, and the right to the city.

She is currently teaching an undergraduate seminar entitled “Race, Space, and Power: Mapping the Global Color Line” (AFST 235, ERM 239, GBL 235) and plans to offer a graduate course entitled “Infrastructures of Empire: Control and Insecurity in the Global South” and an undergraduate seminar on comparative border studies in 2021.