Douglas de Toledo Piza[On Leave Fall 2024]

• Ph.D. in Sociology, The New School
• M.A. in Sociology, University of São Paulo
• B.A. in International Relations, University of São Paulo

• Douglas de Toledo Piza is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Lafayette College. His scholarship interrogates power dynamics at the intersections of the mobilities of people, goods, and material culture across borders. A major line of inquiry of his falls in the emerging field of Asian Latin American studies. His research in this field includes a decade-long ethnography of Chinese vendors in South America’s largest informal economy and his research on the memory of abuses committed against Japanese migrants and descendants in the Americas in the 1940s. His other research projects fall on two additional lines of inquiry, namely the United Nations’ response to climate migration and immigration enforcement reform in the United States. Before joining Lafayette College, he was a research fellow at the International Rescue Committee (2019-2020), where he developed monitoring and evaluation of refugee and asylum programs, and the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility (2014-2019).

• Migration, Diaspora Policies, Refugee Resettlement, and Borders.

Research Topics

• Chinese migration in South America, Chinese diaspora policy, Japanese diaspora across the Americas, climate migration, Special Economic Zones, and economic informality.

Teaching Interests

• International migration, refugee studies, political exile, globalization, research methods, Latin America, and East Asia