Always an Academic Immigrant: A Collective Memoir

Immigrant employees play an essential role in every industry, including academia, but the unique experiences of immigrant professors have received little study. Given that academia has its own distinctive cultural norms, do immigrant academics experience the same kinds of challenges endured by other immigrants?

Always an Academic Immigrant is a collective memoir that gives voice to eighty-one academics who immigrated from thirty-seven countries for a career in an institution of higher education, in either the United States or one of ten other countries. Through in-depth interviews and observations from her own experiences as an immigrant scholar, Dafna Lemish shares the highs and the lows that academic immigrants feel as they search for both a country and an institution they can call home. She discovers the formative events that led these scholars to pursue careers outside their native lands and details the challenges they faced adapting to unspoken expectations in their new countries and workplaces. Ultimately, this book reveals the strategies that immigrant professors use to bridge their native and adoptive cultures while highlighting the vital contributions they have made to academia as scholars, teachers, and leaders.

Author: Dafna Lemish
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 05/13/2025
Pages: 196
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.61lbs
Size: 8.43h x 5.43w x 0.63d
ISBN13: 9781978843615
ISBN10: 1978843615
BISAC Categories:
- Education | Schools | Levels | Higher
- Social Science | Emigration & Immigration
- Biography & Autobiography | General

About the Author
DAFNA LEMISH is a distinguished professor of journalism and media studies and interim dean of the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in New Jersey. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Children and Media, and her many books include Children and Media: A Global Perspective and Screening Gender on Children's Television.