Mira Siegelberg | Reasoning About Borders in the Fin de Siècle and Today

Mira Siegelberg

Associate Professor

The New School for Social Research

Mira Siegelberg is Associate Professor of Politics and Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School for Social Research. She is a historian with interests in European and U.S. intellectual history, the history and theory of rights, law and legal thought, and the politics of citizenship and migration. Her research focuses particularly on the intellectual, legal, and institutional formation of modern international order.

Her first book, Statelessness: A Modern History (Harvard University Press, 2020), is the first major study of the concept of statelessness—a legal category that came to define the absence of national status following the First World War. The book illuminates how mass statelessness shaped the emergence of modern statehood and citizenship. Statelessness received the Francesco Guicciardini Prize for Best Book in Historical International Relations from the International Studies Association; a Certificate of Merit in a Specialized Area of International Law from the American Society of International Law; the Bentley Book Prize (co-winner) from the World History Association for outstanding contribution to the field of world history; The Laura Shannon Prize (Silver Medal) in Contemporary European Studies from the Nanovic Institute. It has been translated into German (Hamburger Edition, 2023) and Arabic (The National Council for Culture, Arts, and Letters/Alam Al-Marifah, 2022) and is currently being translated into Chinese (Gusa Publishing). 

Her current book project continues to explore the ways that those who do not fit into the given borders of the world are fundamentally connected to the prospects of global order and to the challenge of collective political organization. Reasoning About Borders (Statistics, Law, Philosophy) 1880s-Present tells the story of the influential ideas and arguments that arose in competing intellectual and disciplinary traditions about border control in the late nineteenth century. These traditions—the social sciences, philosophy, and international law— remain the dominant languages of contemporary moral and political debate about migration. Rather than focusing on the tension between the rights of individuals to move and the right of political communities to decide on the terms of admission and residence, the book highlights the inevitable complexity of reasoning about the regulation of borders in the interconnected world of global politics. 

Siegelberg received a PhD in History at Harvard University in 2014, after which she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Princeton Society of Fellows, and a permanent lectureship in History and Law at Queen Mary, University of London. Before joining the NSSR Politics Department, she was Associate Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.