Biography

Levi Vonk is a medical anthropologist and creative nonfiction author who conducts ethnographic research with Central American migrants traveling through Mexico. Theoretically, his work centers around questions of the human and the body in relation to technological milieus, especially technologies that allow for border militarization and externalization.

Levi is particularly interested in using anthropological and ethnographic methods to push the boundaries of more mainstream forms of media, such as journalism and the nonfiction book. For instance, his first book, Border Hacker (2022), is a work of literary nonfiction that follows the perilous journey of Axel Kirschner, an Afro Latino undocumented migrant and computer hacker. Levi worked with Axel to create what they call “multi-narrator nonfiction,” a methodology in which the subject co-authors portions of their story in their own first person voice. Border Hacker was named a national finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as shortlisted for the Juan E. Méndez Book Award at Duke University. Jacobin magazine hailed it as a “singularly courageous book.”

Levi’s second book, The Body Migrant (forthcoming), is a work of ethnography and critical theory that investigates a discreet border militarization pact between the US and Mexico known as Southern Border Program, which seeks to dismantle the international asylum system by physically immobilizing migrants as they travel. He is currently also working on another project, as yet untitled, which explores his own family’s immigration history through his brother’s sudden and mysterious loss of long-term memory during the COVID 19 pandemic. Levi is collaborating with his brother’s neurological team to better analyze how they understand the concept of “memory,” where and how memory is stored in the brain, and what technologies are called upon to recover and sustain this memory, as well as how the scientific notion of memory relates to inter-generational social memory and family myth.

He holds a PhD from the Joint Program in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley-UC San Francisco—where he also spent a year as a Visiting Scholar at CIESAS-Mexico City, Mexico’s leading anthropological institute—and an MA in the Anthropology of Development and Social Transformation from the University of Sussex. In addition to his book projects, Levi’s work has been published in Dialectical Anthropology, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Literary Hub, among others, and his radio pieces on migration have aired nationally on NPR. He has received funding from Fulbright-García Robles, Fulbright-DDRA, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, Rotary International, and the UC Berkeley Center for Human Rights, and his photo-ethnographic work with Central American migrants won the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology. He additionally holds a scholar affiliation with the research institution CIDE in Mexico.