Monique Flores Ulysses is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Dartmouth Society of Fellows with an affiliation with 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. Building on her dissertation, her book project analyzes how U.S. and Mexican self-described experts understood the racial meaning of Mexicanness and how their race-making shaped migrant life in the United States from the 1910s through the 1940s. The project charts different spheres of race and immigration expertise that shaped understandings of Mexican racialization in the United States including immigration bureaucracy, anthropology, economics, and eugenics. 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 several pieces of writing including an article examining the experiences of a Chinese/Mexican migrant family as they navigated multiple immigration bureaucracies in the early twentieth century, and a series of essays on reproductive politics, motherhood, and historical research.
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.