About Me

Hilary Parsons Dick completed her Ph.D. in cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She investigates Mexico-U.S. migration from the perspectives of discourse analysis; the political economies of language; and gender, class, and ethno-racial relations. She joined Arcadia University in the fall of 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. She is the 2019-2020 Frank and Evelyn Steinbrucker ‘42 Endowed Chair at Arcadia University. In 2016 she was a Wenner-Gren Hunt Fellow; she was awarded the Hunt Fellowship to support the completion of her first book, Words of Passage: National Longing and the Imagined Lives of Mexican Migrants (May 2018, The University of Texas Press). 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 project concerns the criminalization of Mexican migrants and racializing discourses of sovereignty in anti-immigrant ordinances in small Pennsylvania towns. As part of this project, she is currently working on a new book manuscript, provisionally titled Bad Hombres and Angel Moms: Communicating Commonsense Racism in the Time of Trump (under contract, Oxford University Press). Bad Hombres uses the close textual analysis of Donald Trump's rhetoric to examine how immigration policy toward Latin America contributes to processes of racialization in the United States. Dr. Dick teaches courses on globalization, development, and human rights; transnational migration; Latin American cultures, histories, and economies; research methods and writing; crime and punishment; and the relationship between language and politics. Her ethnographic research is located in Guanajuato, Mexico and Pennsylvania.