Barbara Sostaita, PhD
Assistant Professor
LALS
Contact
Building & Room:
UH 1515
Address:
601 S. Morgan St
Office Phone:
Fax:
Email:
About
Barbara Sostaita is a scholar of religion and global migration. She grew up undocumented in the Nuevo South, the daughter of a baker and evangelical minister—learning from a young age the importance of ritual in the lives of migrants. Professor Sostaita holds a doctoral degree in Religious Studies with a Certificate in Women's and Gender Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first book, Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert (Duke University Press, 2024), is an ethnographic study of fugitive care practices in the Sonoran Desert. This book and her other projects consider how people on the move—including migrants, artists, and organizers—engage with the sacred to cross and transgress borders. She is currently working on two books: The Sanctuary Reader (under contract with The University of California Press) is a collaboration with Lloyd Barba, and the first primary source reader documenting sanctuary movements from the 1980s to the present. Siempre Estoy Llegando is a collection of essays on her father's conversion to Christianity, his work ministering to migrants in the rural south, and her family's complicated relationship with their homeland. Her work has been published in academic journals such as American Religion and Southern Cultures, and in magazines like The Nation and Teen Vogue. At UIC, she teaches courses on Latinx religions, transnational migration, and undocumented social movement.