Bio

Caroline Nagel is Professor of Geography at the University of South Carolina. She received her B.A. in Political Science and Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is serving as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Geography for the 2026–2027 academic year.  She also serves as Faculty Ombuds at the University of South Carolina.

Research 

Caroline is a broadly trained human geographer whose interests lie at the intersection of political geography, migration studies, and religious studies. Caroline has long been interested in the politics of identity, integration, and citizenship in immigrant-receiving contexts. Her work on British Arab and Arab American activists (with the late Lynn Staeheli) and on Christian outreach to immigrants in the U.S. South (with Patricia Ehrkamp, University of Kentucky), for instance, explored themes of transnationalism, multiculturalism, religion, and everyday negotiations of social membership and belonging. Building on this work, Caroline more recently has examined the role of Christian volunteers in the US refugee resettlement program.  This project, a collaboration with Dr. Breanne Grace (Sociology, Virginia Tech) focused attention on volunteers’ motivations in welcoming refugees, and examined how volunteers interpret and implement state-mandated integration programs.   

Caroline also has explored issues relating to youth identity and youth citizenship.  As a Fulbright Scholar in Lebanon (2010-2011), she investigated the role of NGOs in producing youth citizenship discourses in a fragmented political landscape. Back in the U.S., she undertook research on the political subjectivities of young Christians who participate in short-term overseas missions, asking how young people come to understand themselves as being in community with, and as having obligations to, faraway people and places.

Caroline’s current project, with Dr. Kara Brown (College of Education, University of South Carolina), is a return to her core interest in migration.  This study examines the recruitment of overseas-trained teachers in South Carolina and the experiences of these teachers in South Carolina’s underserved public schools.  More broadly, this research speaks to the workings of short-term visa programs and to the ways societies construct ‘labor shortages’.

Caroline’s work has appeared in numerous geography and interdisciplinary journals.  She is the co-editor of two volumes (Geographies of Muslim Women, 2005, with Ghazi-Walid Falah; Political Geography in Practice, with Filippo Menga, Kevin Grove, and Kimberley Peters, 2023); and she is the co-author (with Liz Mavoudi) of Global Migration: Patterns, Processes, and Politics, which is now in its second edition.  She served on the editorial team of the journal Political Geography from 2020 to 2006.

Teaching 

• GEOG 121: Geographies of Global Change
• GEOG 225: Geography of Europe
• GEOG 344: Geographies of American Cities
• GEOG 495: Geography Capstone Seminar
• GEOG 512: Migration and Globalization
• GEOG 712: Graduate Seminar in Urban Geography
• GEOG 735: Graduate Seminar in Political Geography
• GEOG 801: Geographic Thought
  
  

Recent Publications 

Nagel C. and Grace B. (2026).  Going rogue: Refugee resettlement volunteers and the limits of self-sufficiency narratives, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies. DOI: 10.1080/15562948.2026.2694636

Nagel C. and Grace B. (2026).  ‘God’s bringing people to us’: Missional imaginaries and practices among resettlement volunteers in South Carolina, Social & Cultural Geography.  https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2026.2703805

Nagel, C. (2025). Immigration policy in the second Trump administration: Restriction, removal, and the limits of MAGA nativism, Geographical Journal, 91(4), https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.70015.

Nagel, C. and Grace, B. (2023). Navigating the ‘refugee ecosystem’ in research at home, Geographical Review, 114(5): 584–601, https://doi.org/10.1080/00167428.2023.2276941.

Nagel, C. (2023). Moving beyond the migration state (review essay), International Migration Review, 57(2): 846–852. 

Nagel, C. (2021).  Doing missions right: Popular development imaginaries and practices among US evangelicals, Geoforum, 124: 110–119.

Nagel, C. (2021). Christian short-term missions: Creating global citizens? Geopolitics 26(5): 1286–1306.

Nagel, C. (2020). The “problem” of religion in the secular state: Sectarianism and state formation in Lebanon, in S. Moisio, A. Jonas, N. Koch, C. Lizotte, and J. Luukkonen (eds), Handbook on the Changing Geographies of the State: New Spaces of Geopolitics. Northampton, UK: Edward Elgar.