Contact: Sasha Steinberg

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State’s Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures is sponsoring an Oct. 1 presentation by California anthropologist and educator Jason De León.

Free and open to the public, De León’s lecture takes place at 6:30 p.m. in Old Main Academic Center’s Turner A. Wingo Auditorium. His Friday evening talk is titled “The Land of Open Graves: Understanding the Current Politics of Migrant Life and Death Along the U.S.-Mexico Border.”

A 2017 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, De León is a professor of anthropology and Chicana/o studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, from which he earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology. Also holding a Ph.D. in anthropology from Penn State, De León is executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project. For his long-term anthropological study of migration from Latin America to the U.S., he uses a combination of ethnographic, visual, archaeological and forensic approaches to bring to light the lives and deaths of clandestine migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border into the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.

De León has published numerous academic articles, and his work with the UMP has been featured in a variety of popular media outlets. He is the author of the award-winning book “The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail.”

For more on De León’s presentation, contact David Hoffman, MSU associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures, at 662-325-2013 or dhoffman@anthro.msstate.edu.

Learn more about MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at www.cas.msstate.edu and www.amec.msstate.edu.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.