Emiliano Aguilar is assistant professor in the Department of History who became a Kellogg faculty fellow in 2024. His research centers around migration, labor, and politics with an eye to understanding the human development and democratic participation of relative newcomers to the United States. While Aguilar’s work has centered on the US Midwest, he is increasingly exploring a comparative perspective from elsewhere in the world and is looking at both the internationalization of the Midwest that migrants are fueling and the connections between this region and the world. He has been a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow since 2024.
Aguilar is working on his first book manuscript, titled “Building a Latino Machine: Caught Between Corrupt Political Machines and Good Government Reform,” which explores how the ethnic Mexican and Puerto Rican community of East Chicago, Indiana, navigated machine politics in the 20th and 21st centuries to further their inclusion in municipal and union politics.
His work has appeared in The Metropole, Belt Magazine, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s Blog, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, and the Indiana Historical Society Blog, among others. He has authored several chapters for books, including a chapter published in Building Sustainable Worlds: Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest (University of Illinois Press, July 2022).
Aguilar holds a PhD in history from Northwestern University.