Denise Brennan is an anthropologist who writes about migration, trafficking into forced labor, and women’s labor. She is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Georgetown University. Her new book, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States follows the lives of survivors of trafficking to the United States. It documents the ordinary tasks of settling into a new country after extraordinary abuse. Brennan also is the author of What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (2004) that introduces resourceful Dominican women who capitalize on sex-tourism by feigning love to marry foreign men. She is currently conducting field research for a book on how families cope with detention and deportation, Shattering Families: Detention, Deportation and the Assault on Immigrants in the United States.
Brennan has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Association of University Women, the Henry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and Fulbright. She is a graduate of Smith College, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Yale University. Long involved in workers’ rights and migrants’ rights, she has been a board member of Different Avenues and HIPS (Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive), organizations located in Washington, D.C. that work to protect and empower sex workers. Brennan has been interviewed in numerous media outlets, including the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Miami Herald, and U.S. News and World Report.