National Advisory Board

Dr. Robyn Magalit Rodriguez is currently professor and chair of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is also the founding faculty director of the Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies, the first of its kind in the University of California system focused on the Filipinx experience in the United States.

Rodriguez is a im/migration expert. Her writing has focused significantly on the Philippine labor diaspora but she also examines migration from a comparative perspective, particularly linking and relating the migration experiences of Asians and Latinos. Rodriguez’s first book, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), received an honorable mention for best social science book by the Association for Asian American Studies. Additional books include a co-edited anthology (with Ulla Berg) Transnational Citizenship Across the Americas (New York: Routledge 2014), a co-authored book (with Pawan Dhingra), Asian America: Sociological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Polity, 2014). In 2017, she published, In Lady Liberty’s Shadow: Race and Immigration in New Jersey. In 2019, she published her fifth book entitled, Filipino American Transnational Activism (Brill Press).  Dr. Rodriguez is currently at work on several other book projects including a book (with Roy Taggueg) on the Filipino im/migrant communities in the U.S. from the 2000s to present, an anthology (co-edited with Dr. Diane Fujino) on Asian American activism, and an anthology on race, gender and contemporary global labor migration (co-edited with Dr. Leticia Saucedo). In addition to her books she has published over thirty academic and journalistic articles.

Alongside her scholarly work, Rodriguez works as an immigrant rights and antiracism activist and has recently helped to lead an Asian American network in response to COVID-19 in the greater Sacramento region.