Catherine S. Ramírez is Director of the Chicano Latino Reseach Center and Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at UCSC. Ramírez's research and writing look at US cultural history via the lenses of Mexican American history and literature. She is the principal investigator of Non-citizenship, UC Santa Cruz's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on migration and mobility, belonging and rights, and the historical development of the category of the non-citizen. She is the author of The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009) and numerous essays on race, gender, and science fiction. She is also a cofounder of the Latino Cultures Network, an open-access website that promotes and models new research, pedagogy, and collaborative scholarship in Latino studies. Her current book project, Assimilation: An Alternative History, narrates a history of assimilation as a concept, policy, and practice in the United States.