Susanna Rosenbaum is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and Director of the MA in the Study of the Americas. Her research and teaching center immigration, race, and citizenship; gendered labor and neoliberalism; care work; and the Americas. Her book Domestic Economies: Women, Work, and the American Dream in Los Angeles (Duke University Press 2017) examines how Mexican and Central American domestic workers and their primarily white employers seek to achieve the American Dream. Juxtaposing these two groups, it illustrates how immigrant and native-born women work towards that ideal, how each is indispensable to the other's quest, and the abiding importance of reproductive labor to this pursuit. Her current research explores Mexican and Central American immigrant women’s participation in direct sales organizations. It examines self-care as a particular type of care work, analyzing how it shapes immigrant women’s experiences of belonging and exclusion in the US.  This approach opens up questions about consumption, neoliberal forms of citizenship, and self-help, exploring how these reverberate with and are refracted through contemporary racial processes.

PhD, New York University

BA, Wesleyan University

Rosenbaum, Susanna and Danielle Zach, editors. 2020. España, Norteamérica, y tiempos de crisis. Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata. https://www.catarata.org/libro/espana-norteamerica-y-tiempos-de-crisis_105638/

Rosenbaum, Susanna. 2017. Domestic Economies: Women, Work, and the American Dream in Los Angeles. Durham: Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/domestic-economies?viewby=subject&categoryid=6&sort=newest

Rosenbaum, Susanna. 2016. 'Todos Sacrifican': Immigrant Organizing and the Meanings of (Domestic) Work. Working USA: The Journal of Labour and Society. 19(2): 187-206.

Rosenbaum, Susanna. 2014. Domestic Disturbances: Immigrant Workers, Middle-Class Employers, and the American Dream in Los Angeles. In When Care Work Goes Global: Learning the Social Relations of Domestic Work, Mary Romero, Valerie Preston, Wenona Giles eds. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Books.