About Cristina

Cristina Dragomir is completing her Ph.D. at the New School for Social Research with subfield concentrations in American politics and political theory. Her dissertation, “Making the Immigrant Soldiers; An Interpretative Approach on the Political,” explores the tension between new and old affiliations for those immigrants who decide to join the American armed forces. Contrary to much traditional scholarship, which claims that naturalization (and implicitly other forms of identity development) takes place when immigrants either integrate, assimilate or resist, this work demonstrates how all three above-mentioned processes actually occur simultaneously, allowing individuals to coexist in multiple and diverse places. During her year with us in the Political Science department, Cristina plans to investigate the role that gender plays in the naturalization of immigrants via the U.S. military. She plans to organize and analyze data on gender that she had collected during her doctoral studies and review the relevant literature on both immigrant women and women in the military to support the analysis of this data. She will then incorporate this analysis into a manuscript based on her dissertation for submission to a university press.