Jamie Longazel is Associate Professor of Law & Society in the Department of Political Science at John Jay College, and is affilitated with the International Migration Studies (IMS) program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received a PhD in sociology from the University of Delaware in 2011 after completing a Law and Social Science Doctoral Fellowship at the American Bar Foundation. From 2011-2017, he was Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Dayton.

Longazel's research is rooted in the law and society tradition, exploring issues at the intersection of race, political economy, and law. The bulk of his work has focused on immigration law and politics, although he's also written about mass incarceration and the politics of policing. He's especially interested in how sociopolitical and legal processes - each infused with various forms of power - lead us to collectively overlook and thus enable the violent infliction of pain and death. His current project is a critical social history of the immigrant family detention center in Berks County, Pennsylvania. 

Most recently, he co-edited (with Miranda Cady Hallett) Migration and Mortality: Social Death, Dispossession, and Survival in the Americas (Temple University Press, 2021). His previous book, Undocumented Fears: Immigration and the Politics of Divide and Conquer in Hazleton, Pennsylvania (Temple University Press, 2016) won the North Central Sociological Association’s 2017 Scholarly Achievement Award. He is also the co-author (with Benjamin Fleury-Steiner) of The Pains of Mass Imprisonment (2014, Routledge), and has published more than a dozen academic articles in outlets such as Race & Class; Law & Society Review; Law & Social Inquiry; Punishment & Society; and Theoretical Criminology.   

As a working class, first-generation scholar from a hardscrabble former coalmining town, he's grown to appreciate the transformative power of teaching, learning, and research. In addition to his primary teaching assignment in John Jay's undergraduate Law & Society major, he's taught in prisons and has led numerous social movement workshops over the years. Longazel is the co-founder of Anthracite Unite, a collective working on racial and economic justice in Northeast Pennsylvania, and is a member of The Social Anatomy of a Deportation Regime research working group and the Social Change and Transgressive Studies Project.