Rebecca Galemba

Rebecca Galemba (she/her/hers) is an Associate Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies and Co-Director of the DU Center for Immigration Policy & Research (CIPR), which is committed to becoming a hub for research, creative work, clinical training, and community-engaged partnerships on migration. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Brown University in 2009. Galemba's research and teaching span community-based qualitative methods, Latin America, migration, borders, labor rights, asylum, and Latine populations in the United States. She has published two books, Contraband Corridor: Making a Living at the Mexico-Guatemala Border (Stanford University Press 2018) and Laboring for Justice: The Fight Against Wage Theft in an American City (Stanford University Press 2023), which also includes a chapter co-authored with former DU students and other partners. For over a decade, she has collaborated with DU students and community partners, especially Denver's worker center Centro Humanitario para los Trabajadores, to investigate and help redress wage theft and other forms of labor exploitation experienced by Latine immigrant workers in Colorado. Students have published their work through the DU Just Wages Project site and continue to work on the project through Galemba's yearly MA community-engaged service-learning Qualitative Methods class. The DU Just Wages Project has been recognized for its commitment to community engagement and creative approaches to scholarship and mentorship with the DU Public Good Faculty of the Year award (2018), the Setha M. Low Engaged Anthropology Award from the American Anthropological Association (2022), and the Kate Browne Creativity in Research Award from the Society for Economic Anthropology (2023). Galemba currently serves on the Board of Directors for Centro Humanitario and also volunteers with its Wage Theft Direct Action Team alongside students, workers, and community members.