2026 Provost Colloquium

The Wanderers: Recovering Overlooked Migration Narratives in Turbulent Times
by Prof. Daniela Gerson

Wednesday, April 22, 2026 at 3:00 p.m.
Location - The Orchard Conference Center

Please be sure to RSVP by Tuesday, April 21, 2026 at 5:00 p.m.
RSVP to the Event:

Research and Sponsored Programs, with support from the Jerome Richfield Memorial Fund, organizes each year an event that celebrates a CSUN faculty member engaged in high quality, high-impact research, where they are named as the Richfield Memorial Fellow. The Fellow presents a lecture at the Provost’s Colloquium Series, which is designed to highlight and celebrate the scholarly achievements of our faculty, and to provide an opportunity for socialization among faculty, administrators, students, and staff.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Daniela H. Gerson has been named the 2026 Jerome Richfield Memorial Fellow. Prof. Gerson is an award-winning reporter whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Public Radio International, and the Financial Times, among other outlets. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism within the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media and Communication. Currently, Prof. Gerson is the editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square. She previously worked as a community engagement editor at the LA Times and as a staff immigration reporter for the New York Sun.

In addition to her journalism, Prof. Gerson has directed programs at the intersection of civic engagement and news representation for the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School and the City University of New York’s Newmark School. She also co-founded Migratory Notes, an immigration-focused newsletter, and spent more than a year reporting from Berlin as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation German Chancellor Scholar and an Arthur F. Burns Fellow. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Southern California, she speaks Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Hebrew.

The Jerome Richfield Memorial Fellowship celebrates a CSUN faculty member engaged in high-quality, high-impact research. As part of this recognition, Prof. Gerson will present a public lecture on Wednesday, April 8, 2026, as part of the Provost Colloquium Series. Please join us in congratulating Prof. Gerson on this well-deserved honor.

Requests for accommodation services (e.g., sign language interpreters or transcribers) must be made at least five (5) business days in advance. Please contact Deanna A Maidy (deanna.maidy@csun.edu) by March 25, 2026. 

Presentation abstract:

How does one tell immigration stories amid today's exclusionary policy landscape and heightened public discourse? This presentation examines how Associate Professor of Journalism Daniela Gerson has merged investigative and ethnographic reporting with historical and archival research to illuminate migration narratives that challenge dominant frameworks. Her book, The Wanderers (Hachette, 2026), uses this methodology to recover stories largely missing from public memory. Drawing on two decades of reporting featured in outlets such as The New York Times, Financial Times, and LA Times, Gerson will present findings about what gets lost when immigration coverage flattens the complexities of immigrant lives. She will share insights from innovative initiatives she has led to broaden coverage, revealing systematic gaps in mainstream reporting and their implications for public understanding of migration. The presentation centers on how Gerson employed her multimodal approach across ten countries to write The Wanderers, which recounts a largely unknown Holocaust survival story where salvation came ironically via deportation to Stalin's Gulag and Central Asia. She probed government records—from U.S. Department of Homeland Security files to Russian secret police archives to Uzbek birth certificates—revealing hidden relatives and uncovering lies and arrival myths. Her resulting book interweaves her family history with her wife's, revealing why complex and potentially explosive migration narratives often go overlooked. At this combustible juncture, Gerson offers a framework for documenting refugee journeys to ensure they are not left untold. 

Previous Fellows

Year	Name	Department	Presentation Title
2025	Peter L Bishay	Mechanical Engineering	Advances in Upper Limb Prostheses Control, Haptic Feedback, and Training Systems
2024	Patchareeya P. Kwan	Health Sciences	The SEA US, HEAR US Study: Using research and data to provide visibility to invisible Americans
2023	Myriam Forster	Health Sciences	The Impact of familial incarceration on youth outcomes; the promise of the university-community partnerships for health and wellbeing
2022	Denise Sandoval	Chicana and Chicano Studies	Low and Slow/Bajito y Suavecito
2021	Virginia W Huynh	Child & Adolescent Development	Family Approaches to Race and Inequality
2020	Helene Rougier	Anthropology	The Disappearance of Our Closest Relatives, The Neanderthals: Were We Involved?
2019	Allen Eugene Lipscomb	Social Work	I Know Why the Black Man Grieves
2018	Martin Pousson	English	Black Sheep Boy
2017	Peter Edmunds	Biology	Cooking Corals in Acid Water
2016	Kristen Walker	Marketing	Surrender Information Through the Looking Glass
2015	Erica Wohldmann	Psychology	Welcome to Your Plate: How Individual Choices Can Create a Better World One Bite at a Time