Suárez-Orozco Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

Professor Carola Suárez-Orozco, director of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard, was awarded the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship to work on a book documenting the needs of immigrant students in America and what educators can do to better serve them. Of the 188 new Guggenheim fellows representing 52 fields, Suárez-Orozco is the only one representing the field of education.

“Frankly, I can’t quite believe it and am pinching myself,” says Suárez-Orozco of earning the fellowship. “The fellowship will provide me the gift of time to delve deeply into the most recent research across an array of fields and to write what has been percolating in my mind over the last few decades.”

Suárez-Orozco’s book, tentatively titled Overlooked No More: Frameworks for Reimagining Educational Flourishing for Immigrant-Origin Students, will examine the current knowledge around immigrant students based on decades of her own research and experience, as well as a synthesis of new research across multiple disciplines. “While the population of immigrant-origin children continues to grow, our approach in education (and across service occupations) has remained rather disparate and scattered in its approach to serving them,” says Suárez-Orozco. “This book will seek to provide a comprehensive accounting of the field from a developmental point of view with a focus on educational serving contexts. I will seek to articulate: What are the developmental and educational need of immigrant students? What should all educators know to better serve them? How can we best foster educational settings that are sites of possibilities for them?”

Suárez-Orozco will draw upon the work of leading researchers and experts in domains such as language learning, acculturation, identity development, and undocumented status, synthesizing emerging perspectives of new, diverse scholars and including a global perspective, in an effort to take a whole-child comprehensive view of immigrant child and youth development.

“Immigrant origin young people have been at the heart (and top of mind) of the work I have been doing for decades,” says Suárez-Orozco. “They are both inspiring and neglected — though they make up over a quarter of our K-12 students and a third of our students in higher education. I would like to think that this Guggenheim is a recognition of these young people’s presence and societal import. I am extraordinarily humbled and honored by the award and will strive to carry forward work that shines a light on them.”

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, launched in 1925, awards individuals “whose passions often have broad and immediate social impact” and provides them with the freedom to continue to pursue their scholarship or creative endeavors. “Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in a press release. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It’s a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers, and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”

Throughout her 30-year research career, Suárez-Orozco has sought to understand how first- and second-generation children and youth experience immigration, how they are changed by this experience, and the role schools play as a crucial point of contact between immigrant families and the new society. She was elected to the National Academy of Education in 2016 and served as chair of the American Psychological Association Presidential Task Force on Immigration from 2010 to 2012. She is author and editor of many books on the immigrant experience in the United States, including Immigrant-Origin Students in Community College: Navigating Risk and Reward in Higher Education, Transitions: The Development of the Children of Immigrants, and Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society. She has been director of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard since 2022.