Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is the Doris Stevens Professor in Women’s Studies and Professor of Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research examines the experiences of women from the Philippines to understand how gender shapes migration, how states manage migration, how gendered economies operate in globalization and how worker unfreedom is a constitutive element of development. She is a scholar of gender, migration, labor, and economic sociology. 

She has completed four ethnographic studies including Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States, which was recognized with the 2023 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award by the American Sociological Association. Her other books include Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work; Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes; and Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo. She is the co-editor of a book series for Stanford University Press, Globalization in Everyday Life. Her articles have been published in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology and Gender & Society. In 2019, she received the Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association, which is the discipline’s highest award given to a gender scholar. For her commitment to transformative scholarship, she received the 2018 Feminist Activist Award from the ASA Sex and Gender Section. Her mentorship of junior scholars was recognized in 2020 with a Mentoring Award from Sociologists for Women in Society.

She teaches classes on feminist theory, gender and globalization, intimacy, and gender, sexuality and migration. Her current project examines the nurse migration industry in the Philippines. 

Professor Parreñas has received research funding from the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and National Science Foundation, and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the Institute for Advanced Study. Her writings have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Spanish. She has given keynote and named lectures in over 20 countries. 

An active evaluator of external fellowships and grants, she has participated in review panels for the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program, American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, and the Social Science Research Council. She is a former member of the university-wide tenure and promotions committee at Brown University and the University of Southern California.