Hilary Parsons Dick is an Associate Professor of International Studies at Arcadia University; she was the 2019-2021 Frank and Evelyn Steinbrucker ‘42 Endowed Chair for her project The Social Life of Immigration Law. She completed her Ph.D. in cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Dick investigates migration and displacement between Central America, Mexico, and the United States from the perspectives of discourse analysis; the political economies of language; and gender, class, and ethno-racial inequity. She joined Arcadia in fall 2011 after tenures as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago's Center for Latin American Studies and Temple University's Center for the Humanities. In 2016, she was awarded the Wenner-Gren Hunt Fellowship to support the completion of her first book, Words of Passage: National Longing and the Imagined Lives of Mexican Migrants (The University of Texas Press), which was recognized by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology as a Distinguished Book in Linguistic Anthropology (2017-2018). The book examines how people use talk about migration to critique of the failures of economic development for working-class people who live between Mexico and the United States. Her new research entails a two-pronged engagement with US immigration law. One engagement is her second book (under contract, Oxford University Press), which examines how the juridical and vernacular construction of "asylum seekers" in the US functions as racializing and gendering practices that marginalize and dehumanize migrants from the Global South. The other engagement is a long-term ethnographic research project examining how migrants and their legal advocates work collaboratively to resist this gendered racialization and gain legal recognition for migrants.