Monique Flores Ulysses is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Dartmouth Society of Fellows with affiliation in the Department of History. She is an interdisciplinary historian of race and immigration in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States. Her research and teaching focus on how racial classifications are constructed, upheld, and contested as related to migrants within different sites of sociopolitical and cultural power and knowledge production.
Monique received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2023, where her dissertation won the Frederick W. Beinecke Prize, awarded to an outstanding doctoral dissertation in Western American History. Expanding on her doctoral dissertation, her current book project, tentatively titled Making Mexicans: Mexican Migration and Racial Knowledge Production in the United States, 1910-1942, analyzes how U.S. and Mexican academics, bureaucrats, and political organizers understood the racial meaning of Mexicanness and how their race-making shaped migrant life in the United States between the start of the Mexican Revolution and the beginning of the Bracero Program. The project charts different spheres of race and immigration expertise that shaped understandings of Mexican racialization in the United States including anthropology, eugenics, economics, immigration bureaucracy, the U.S. federal census, and the work of leftist political organizers. Making Mexicans argues that intellectual, bureaucratic, and political experts in the United States were critical to producing racial knowledge about Mexican migrants in the first half of the twentieth century, and that this knowledge production had direct, material consequences in the everyday lived experiences of migrant communities across the United States for decades, especially in the context of their labour exploitation. Her research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) as a Doctoral Fellow alongside support from the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM) and the John Morton Blum Fellowship for Graduate Research in American History and Culture, among other sources.
Along with her current book project, she is at work on an academic article examining the experiences of a Chinese/Mexican migrant family as they navigated multiple immigration bureaucracies in the early twentieth century, and a second article on disability and death among Bracero workers during the Bracero Program. She is also at work on a series of personal essays on reproductive politics, motherhood, and archival research.
During AY 2024-2025, she will be teaching "Histories of Mexican America" in the Spring quarter and encourages interested students to contact her with any questions they may have of the course.
Previous to her doctoral degree, she received a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in History and Environmental Studies from the University of Victoria in 2014, and a Master of Arts in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University in 2015. She is Mexican and Cypriot, and grew up in what is currently known as Victoria, Canada on Lekwungen and W̱SÁNÉC territories.