The Haas Institute is proud to congratulate two fellows—one current and one former—who are recipients of the prestigious 2018 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. The fellowship honors the contributions of immigrants and children of immigrants to the United States.
Joel Sati, a law student at UC Berkeley and the Haas Institute’s Coblentz Fellow, and Natalia Reyes, a current MFA candidate at the University of Iowa and former communications fellow with the Haas Institute, are just two of the 30 “New Americans”—immigrants and children of immigrants—selected for the fellowship. The fellowship is a $90,000 merit-based fellowship for immigrants and children of immigrants who are pursuing graduate school in the US. More than 1,500 applicants apply annually for the award.
Sati immigrated to the United States from Nairobi, Kenya at age nine, going on to attend the City College of New York (CCNY). While a student, Sati worked a youth organizer for African Communities Together, mobilizing African youth around immigration issues, as well as co-designed and co-taught a Black political thought course at CCNY—now a permanent course offered through the university’s Political Science department.
As a PhD student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at UC Berkeley and a JD candidate at the Yale Law School, Sati’s scholarship focuses on the intersections of law, epistemology, and philosophy as they relate to contemporary issues of noncitizenship and illegality. His work explores what he calls “illegalization,” or the legal-institutional processes that cast people as “less-than-capable knowers” in the law.
Reyes, who was born in Indio, California to parents from Mexico, earned a BA in Rhetoric with a concentration in public discourse and a minor in creative writing at UC Berkeley, where she also worked as a communications fellow with the Haas Institute. While an undergrad, Reyes was also a leader for a nonprofit student housing cooperative and an arts & culture writer for UC Berkeley’s independent student newspaper The Daily Californian. She now write narratives about “both sides of the US-Mexico border at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she also studies pedagogy,” according to the announcement.
