Sarah J. Mahler

Sarah J. Mahler (born 1959) is an American author and cultural anthropologist.

She was part of a group of anthropologists attempting to change migration studies to a more comprehensive way to understand how migrants crossing international borders remain tied to their homelands and how cultural practices and identities reflect influences from past and present contexts, called "transnational migration."

Sarah J. Mahler was born in York, Pennsylvania but spent most of her formative years in rural upstate New York in the western Catskill Mountains.

As Central Americans’ story had not been told during the very difficult years of civil wars in the 1980s and early 1990s, Mahler decided to focus her dissertation on highlighting their plight; this was eventually published in two books.

She earned a bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts from Amherst College in 1982, a year later than her graduating class because after her sophomore year, she took a year leave, moved to Colombia, and immersed herself in a different culture and language.

Upon graduating, she worked in Manhattan for several years before continuing her education at Columbia University, earning a master's degree in Anthropology in 1989, and a Ph.D. in 1992.

While in school and living predominantly in Latin American neighborhoods in New York City, she taught English as a second language for free, and became trained in immigration law.

During those years she also worked with refugees fleeing violent wars in Central America.

After graduation, Mahler taught at the University of Vermont from 1992 to 1997 in the Anthropology department, and Florida International University from 1997, where she continues to teach courses in the interdisciplinary department of Global and Sociocultural Studies.

Her academic expertise is in cultural anthropology and international migration from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States.

She joined a group of anthropologists and other scholars seeking to shift migration studies from just examining immigrants’ lives in their new country to a more comprehensive approach called transnational migration which researches how people who migrate across international borders nonetheless retain ties to their homelands, and how their cultural practices and identities reflect influence from previous and present contexts.

Mahler’s contributions to this paradigm shift in migration studies have focused on how migrants’ gender relations typically shift, even for family members who themselves do not migrate.

In 1994, she was awarded a prestigious research fellowship at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, one of the country’s premier social science fellowships.

During her residency, Mahler finished American Dreaming and wrote her second book, Salvadorans in Suburbia: Symbiosis and Conflict.

The first, American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins (Princeton 1995) was reviewed by The New York Times, has been used by scores of faculty teaching courses on area studies, and has helped a train a generation of new researchers on immigration.

It remains an academic best seller despite being published almost two decades ago.

Due to her work with immigrants and refugees, in 1996 she was honored by the Central American Refugee Center for years of advocacy in defense of human rights.

In 2004, Mahler served as director of her department’s graduate studies program and in that year she oversaw a major shift in the graduate curriculum.

In 2005 she was promoted to Director of the Center for Transnational and Comparative Studies at Florida International University.

She served in that capacity in charge of numerous international study programs until 2008 when the center was closed for budgetary reasons.

She then embarked on a major shift in her research, returning to an early passion for how people learn the culture that she had wanted to pursue since her daughter Sophia was born.

Since 2008 she has dedicated herself wholly to studying the wide-ranging interdisciplinary literature on the brain and how infants and children learn in general, and how they learn culture in particular.

The results of this research are being published (see below).

In 2011, Mahler was awarded the first Provost Award for Graduate Student Mentorship conferred by FIU’s Graduate School.

Mahler's next book, Culture as Comfort: The Many Things You Already Know [but might not realize] About Culture, was due to be published by Pearson Education in the summer of 2012.

The book is the first step in a larger project aimed at shifting people’s everyday understandings of culture toward focusing on how creative and positive we can be culturally, instead of divisive and destructive.

With her husband, Miguel Marante, Mahler lives a peripatetic life from their RV.

Her daughter, Sophia Dominguez-Mahler, is in college.

Mahler also has three stepchildren and seven step-grandchildren.