Professional Bio
Dr. Anita Casavantes Bradford holds a Ph.D. in U.S. and Latino/Latin American History from the University of California San Diego. Her areas of expertise include Transnational and Comparative Latina/o History, Cuban and Cuban-American History, the History of Immigration, Race and Ethnicity, and the History of Childhood and the Family.
Throughout the academic year Dr. Casavantes Bradford teaches Introduction to Chicano/Latino History (CLS 61), the History of U.S. Immigration, the History of Childhood, Comparative Latina/o History, and Cuban/Cuban-American History.
Dr. Casavantes Bradford’s historical investigation of the politics of childhood in the transnational Cuban and Cuban-American community, entitled The Revolution is For the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959-1962, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2014. She is currently at work on a second book project entitled Suffer the Little Children: Unaccompanied Child Migrants and the Geopolitics of Compassion in Postwar America, which she is developing for the University of North Carolina Press. She has also published articles and reviews in the journals Cuban Studies, Diplomatic History, Camino Real, US Catholic Historian, and The American Historical Review. She has presented excerpts from her work at the American Historical Association (AHA) and Latin American Studies Association (LASA) conferences and at the biannual Cuban Research Institute conference at Florida International University in Miami. She also serves as Co-Director of the UC-Cuba Multi-Campus Academic Initiative, which supports graduate student and faculty research on Cuban topics.
Dr. Casavantes Bradford is a former University of California Presidents’ Postdoctoral Fellow, and her work was awarded the 2011 UC-Cuba Marta Abreu Dissertation Prize. Her research has been supported by the UCI Cultural Research Grant, the Cuban Heritage Collection Research Fellowship program at the University of Miami, UC-Cuba Multi-Campus Research Program, and the University of California San Diego Latino Studies Research Initiative.
Born in Vancouver, Canada, Dr. Casavantes Bradford has lived, worked and volunteered in the U.S., Mexico, Central America, Japan and Southern Africa. She is a former high school teacher and freelance journalist, and has published a number of feature articles, reviews and commentaries, both in the U.S. and internationally, on Latina/o communities, culture, education and social inequality. She is a migrant rights activist, diversity educator, and passionate advocate for first generation university students like herself, and is committed to pursuing a research agenda that reflects her commitment to social justice, the wellbeing of Latina/o communities and of children from all backgrounds and around the world. She currently chairs UCI’s Committee on Equity and Inclusion for AB540/Undocumented Students, and is the Director of UCI’s First Generation Faculty Initiative. She has received the UCI Outstanding Social Justice Activist Award (2015) and the Social Science Dean’s Award for Outstanding Mentorship (2016).