Monica Varsanyi is Associate Professor of Political Science and a member of the doctoral faculty in Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center.  She received a BA and Ph.D. from UCLA and MA from the University of Washington.  Her research and teaching interests include urban politics and federalism, immigration and citizenship law and policy; and political, legal, and urban geography.  She is currently working on two related projects:  one that explores growing tensions between local and state grassroots immigration policy activism and the U.S. federal government’s plenary power over immigration; and second, an NSF-funded project that explores the expanding involvement of city police in immigration enforcement and the impact this is having on the relationship between local police and (unauthorized) immigrant communities.  Her publications include articles in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Urban Geography, Geopolitics, Citizenship Studies, Antipode, and Space and Polity, and popular outlets such as the Los Angeles Times.  Prior to joining the faculty at John Jay, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Centers for Comparative Immigration Studies and U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and taught in the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University.  She is currently the Chair of the Ethics, Justice, and Human Rights Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers.