Anna Hidalgo is a Visiting Scholar at The Institute for Public Knowledge. She is an ethnographer and qualitative sociologist studying culture, sexuality, gender, race, and migration. Broadly, Anna explores how people, particularly those with marginalized identities, make meaning and craft lives amid structural and social constraints. From positions of marginality and alienation, we might reasonably expect people to react with hopelessness, despair, and defeat. Yet, they often respond with creativity, strategy, and hope. Anna’s work explores how and why such responses emerge, their possibilities and limitations, and what they reveal about power and inequality
Anna is currently working on a book manuscript for UC Press which examines transnational intimate relationships in a Peruvian coastal town. A new project focuses on the experiences of Venezuelan asylum seekers in New York City. Her work has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, and the American Association for University Women, among others.
Prior to her appointment at IPK, Anna was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in the Department of Sociology at NYU’s school of Arts and Sciences. She received her PhD in Sociology from Columbia University and her BA in History from Brown University. Previously, she worked with the CDC’s National HIV Behavioral Surveillance Study at the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts, and was a Senior Research Assistant with the NIH Adolescent Trials Network at The Fenway Institute. Anna was born in the Dominican Republic, and was raised in South Florida.
Anna is currently on maternity leave and will return to campus in Spring 2026. You can learn more about her and her work here: https://annaphidalgo.com/