Fabio Heupel Santos

Fabio Heupel Santos is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Histories of Migration at the SAXO-Institute within the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, where he joined in January 2025. Previously, he served as Assistant Professor at the Institute for Latin American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin (2019-2024), and held visiting positions at UC Berkeley, Aarhus University, and the University of Vienna.

His academic journey includes:

• Doctorate in Sociology, Freie Universität Berlin, summa cum laude (2019)
• Master of Arts in Sociology, Freie Universität Berlin (2015)
• Bachelor of Arts in European Ethnology (major) and Cultural History and Theory (minor), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2013)

Santos specializes in border(lands), citizenship, belonging, inequality, and intersectionality, with regional expertise in Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States. His research interweaves intimate local experiences with global structural forces, revealing how everyday realities are shaped by broader entanglements. This approach is exemplified in his book Bridging Fluid Borders: Entanglements in the French-Brazilian Borderland (Routledge, 2022), which examines the cross-border bridge between French Guiana and Brazil.

His recent publications demonstrate a consistent focus on migration, border studies, and postcolonial theory, with particular attention to historical sociology and ethnographic methodologies. Santos is currently writing a second monograph reconstructing fugitive histories embedded in Fort Allen, a U.S. military base in Puerto Rico that served as a detention center for Haitian refugees in the 1980s.

His scholarly contributions have been recognized with prestigious awards including the Rinus Penninx Best Paper Award (2025) and the Best Paper Award at the World Congress of the Association for Borderlands Studies (2018).

• Rinus Penninx Best Paper Award, IMISCOE Annual Conference (2025)
• Best Paper Award, World Congress of the Association for Borderlands Studies (2018)
• Best Paper Award, 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Borderlands Studies (2017)

Santos has secured significant research funding including a 12-month "History of Migration" Fellowship at UC Berkeley funded by VolkswagenStiftung (2023), and multiple Erasmus+ Program grants. He serves on the editorial board of Ensaios de Geografia and holds leadership positions including Secretary-Treasurer of RC56 (Historical Sociology) at the International Sociological Association.

As an active participant in multiple research networks including the DFG-funded Scientific Network on Qualitative Social Research, Santos collaborates internationally across Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean, contributing to decolonial and postcolonial theoretical frameworks in migration studies.