Chiara Galli
Assistant Professor
Department of Comparative Human Development and the College
Chiara Galli is a sociologist who is interested in international migration, childhood, and law and policy. Her work asks how immigration laws shape people’s lives and how children differ from adults as migratory actors and legal subjects. Her upcoming book, Precarious Protections: Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum in the US (University of California Press, 2023), is an ethnography of the experiences of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they pursue applications for refugee status in the US asylum process. She is also currently working on two collaborative research projects. Using administrative data from US immigration courts, one project examines access to legal representation and determinants of case outcomes for undocumented, unaccompanied children who are entangled in deportation proceedings. Using survey data from the Mexican Migration Project, a second project compares determinants of Mexican child and adult migration to the US, asking how these have evolved historically from the 1960s until today.
Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the John Randolph Haynes Foundation, and the Latino Center for Leadership Development.
Galli received her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University. She also holds an interdisciplinary master’s degree in migration and development from Universidad de Granada in Spain and a bachelor’s degree in development economics from Sapienza University of Rome, in her native Italy.