Denise Brennan

Denise Brennan

Denise Brennan

Denise Brennan

National Advisory Board Member
Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Faculty Co-Director of the Gender+ Justice Initiative at Georgetown University
Email: Denise.Brennan@georgetown.edu

Denise Brennan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Faculty Co-Director of the Gender+ Justice Initiative at Georgetown University. Her scholarship focuses on borders, migration, climate change, trafficking, policing, and sex work. She has conducted anthropological field research with the first survivors of human trafficking to the United States, undocumented individuals and mixed-status families living inside the “100-Mile Border Zone,” and women who migrate internally to sell sex in tourist zones in the Dominican Republic. She has just begun the field research for a new book on displacement and dispossession through wildfire with migrant workers who work near the fire line as well as with migrant “disaster workers” who clean up after extreme weather events.

She is the author of Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States and What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic, both with Duke University Press. She is currently finishing a new book, The Border is Everywhere: Policing Everyday Life in An Era of Mass Deportation, and has begun the field research for a book on climate change: Life Amidst Fire: Climate Change, Migration, and Work. She has held residential fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J., and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Her research also has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the Fulbright Program. She is an Advisor to the Best Practices Policy Project, and has been a board member of Different Avenues, and HIPS — organizations that work to protect the rights of people who engage in the sex sector. She also founded the Trafficking Survivor Leadership Training Fund that provides support for trafficking survivor-advocates.