Koulish Profile

Some background.  Born and raised in greater NYC area, I am an interdisciplinary and experiential political scientist– B.A. from University of Pennsylvania, and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

For the last several years, I have been writing about legal issues with a focus on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico Border, new media, teaching and learning (service-learning), and non-profits. I come to these topics with an intellectual curiosity about contested public spaces and borders.

At the moment, I am writing the manuscript for a book, Immigration and American Democracy: Subverting the Rule of Law, to be published by Routledge Press in 2009. My focus is on sovereignty, neo-liberalism and risk theory as they pertain to immigration control.

In 2000-2001, I was lead investigator for a research project I designed in Hungary (2000-2001). I examined Roma (aka Gypsy) minority rights and self governance. My research was housed at the Budapest University Economic Sciences (BUES) and at the NGO Partners Hungary.

Before that I conducted research at the US-Mexican Border with immigrant victims of human rights abuses and political asylum applicants. My first publication was a law review article in the NYU Review Law & Social Change documenting asylum applicant’s struggle against a byzantine immigration system (see Systemic Deterrence of Asylum Seekers). Since then, I have written about 20 articles and book chapters, including a book chapter about citizenship service-learning where immigrants teach college students about citizenship.

I also penned pieces about the privatization of immigration control in the Baltimore Sun (see Corporate Takeover of American Borders); the online Monthly Review (zine) (see Privatizing the Leviathan Immigration State); and more extensive articles focusing on privatization, plenary powers and state action in the Journal of Refugee and Migration Issues (JRMI), and the St. Thomas Law Review.

Other related research interests include the privatization of the First Amendment, and commercialization of public life. An article on Bono and the commodification of free speech was recently published in the Pepperdine Journal of Business Entrepreneurship and Law (JBEL).