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Andrew Urban
Associate Professor, American Studies and History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
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Andrew Urban
Associate Professor, American Studies and History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Detention and Deportation, Government Agencies (INS, DHS), Immigration During the 19th Century, Immigration During the 20th Century, Labor Migration, Nativism and Xenophobia
AREAS OF TEACHING
Migration History, Labor History, Museum and Monuments
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
BIO
Andy Urban is an Associate Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His research, scholarship, teaching, and public humanities work focus on labor, migration, and public memory.
EXTENDED PROFILE
Andy Urban is an Associate Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His research, scholarship, teaching, and public humanities work focus on labor, migration, and public memory. Andy’s current book project, Processing History: Labor, Capitalism, and Memory at Seabrook Farms (forthcoming, 2026), explores the history and public memory of Seabrook Farms, an agribusiness in southern New Jersey that recruited and employed incarcerated Japanese Americans, guestworkers from the British West Indies, Black and white migrant farmworkers from the US South, European Displaced Persons, and stateless Japanese Peruvians during the 1940s and 1950s. An industry leader and innovator in the growing, processing, storing, distributing, and, ultimately, marketing and branding of frozen vegetables, Seabrook Farms was a company town where brutal labor practices undergirded the capitalist birth of a novel, “miracle” consumer product. Andy’s first book, Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century (NYU Press, 2018), examines how federal immigration policies, commercial agents, and employers shaped labor markets for domestic service in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century United States.
In June 2024, Andy was awarded a three-year Mellon Foundation Monuments Project grant, to support the New Jersey Im/migrant Laborers’ Monument Project. This project will develop monument installations, through a participatory process, exploring im/migrants’ contributions to the state as laborers, and how migrants and laborers have featured – or not featured – in commemorative landscapes. Since 2021, Andy has also directed the New Brunswick / North Brunswick High Schools Public Memory Project, a collaboration between community stakeholders, scholars, students, and artists, focused on the creation of public programming, art, and dialogue exploring histories of school integration and segregation. This project coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the withdrawal of approximately 700 white students from New Brunswick High School in 1974, and their matriculation at the newly finished, nearly all-white high school in North Brunswick.
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