Andy Urban is an Associate Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His research, scholarship, teaching, and public humanities work focus on labor, migration, and public memory. Andy’s current book project, Processing History: Labor, Capitalism, and Memory at Seabrook Farms (forthcoming, 2027), explores the history of Seabrook Farms, an agribusiness in southern New Jersey that recruited and employed incarcerated Japanese Americans, guestworkers from the British West Indies, Black and white migrant farmworkers from the US South, European Displaced Persons, and stateless Japanese Peruvians during the 1940s and 1950s. An industry leader and innovator in the growing, processing, storing, and marketing and branding of frozen vegetables, Seabrook Farms was a company town where brutal labor practices undergirded the capitalist birth of a novel, “miracle” consumer product. Andy’s first book, Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century (NYU Press, 2018), examines how federal immigration policies, commercial agents, and employers, shaped labor markets for domestic service in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century United States.
In June 2024, Andy was awarded a three-year Mellon Foundation Monuments Project grant, to support Monuments to Migration and Labor: The New Jersey Im/migrant Laborers’ Monument Project. Monuments to Migration and Labor invites public stakeholders in New Jersey to create, through collaborative and participatory processes, public art and history that celebrates the lives and stories of immigrant and migrant workers across the state, past and present. In the face of falsehoods about immigrants, this project seeks to reclaim public landscapes and commemorative spaces, to critically engage with what immigrants and migrants contribute to New Jersey and the United States.
Since 2021, Andy has also directed the New Brunswick / North Brunswick High Schools Public Memory Project, a collaboration between community stakeholders, scholars, students, and artists, focused on the creation of public programming, art, and dialogue exploring histories of school integration and segregation in Middlesex County, New Jersey. This project coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the withdrawal of approximately 700 white students from New Brunswick High School in 1974, and their matriculation at the newly finished, nearly all-white high school in North Brunswick.
A full list of Andy’s publications, public humanities work, exhibitions, and service to the university and profession can be found on his personal website, www.andyturban.org.