Kelly Lytle Hernández is an American academic and historian. Hernández is a tenured professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and is the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. In 2019 she received a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant". She is an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize Board. Since her MacArthur Grant she has been called a "rebel historian", a label she is proud and "honored" to own. Early life Hernández was born on March 3, 1974 to Cecil Lytle and Rebecca E. Lytle and grew up in the Clairemont area of San Diego. Her father was a music professor and Thurgood Marshall College provost at the University of California, San Diego where he taught for 34 years. Her mother, who worked as an art editor, died in 1994. Hernández received a Bachelor of Arts in Ethnic Studies in 1996 from the University of California, San Diego. She then spent a year in South Africa working and teaching at a farm school before returning to school. In 2002, she received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. Scholarship She has described seeing the U.S. Border Patrol track and monitor Latinos in her community and noticed it as "being hauntingly similar to what many of what us African American kids and teens were experiencing in terms of the rise of the war on drugs at the same time." She experienced her own "share of locker sweeps at school and was registered as a 'gang member' by the local police." She even watched as a friend was accused of dealing drugs and shot four times by the police. In the neighborhoods where she lived, armed border officers targeted Mexicans"snatched them off buses, chased them across highways, and took my friend's uncle in the middle of the night." Observing these parallels between the war on drugs and the war on immigrants, she felt compelled "to go on and study these systems." All of her books and scholarly articles are based on her research into the history of race, immigration control, border enforcement, policing and incarceration. She has written three books and numerous scholarly articles and is