Samantha (Sam) Haddad Prophet

Bio

Samantha (Sam) Haddad Prophet is a fifth-year PhD candidate in History at William & Mary whose research examines immigration enforcement, incarceration, and undocumented Irish migration in the late twentieth-century United States. Her dissertation, tentatively entitled “Policing Paddies: Undocumented Irish Migration, Law Enforcement, and the Jurisdictional Boundaries of American Policing Powers, 1986–1996,” explores how law enforcement and government officials across different municipalities, states, and even national borders enforced, negotiated, and sometimes deliberately avoided their policing obligations toward undocumented Irish migrants.

Samantha’s research has been generously supported and recognized by fellowships and awards from the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS), the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS), Mount Holyoke College’s Skinner Fellowship, New York University’s Ernie O’Malley Family Research Grant, the University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), and the American Society for Legal History (ASLH). Her writing can be found in Writing the Troubles, Reconstructing the Ethnic Village, the Australian Journal of Irish Studies, and Irish Studies Review.

Samantha received her M.A. in Irish and Irish American Studies from New York University in 2021 and her M.A. in History from William & Mary in 2023. She earned her B.A. in History and Art History from Mount Holyoke College in 2019, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, and with High Honors.