Op-Eds and Short Essays
"Migrant Resilience and Refuge in the Trump Era." Anthropology News. June 16, 2017.
"Want to fight trafficking? Fight for immigration reform." Thomson Reuters Foundation News. April 23, 2017.
"Life After Trafficking," from Beyond Survival: Organizing to End Human Trafficking of Domestic Workers, National Domestic Workers Alliance. January 2015.
"Ending Everyday Forms of Exploitation in Our Fields Prevents Trafficking." Human Trafficking Search Online. January 26, 2015.
"Determining What Level of Exploitation is Enough to Qualify as 'Trafficked' Leaves Most Migrants Out of Assistance." USAPP -- American Politics and Policy Online. London School of Economics and Political Science. May 6, 2014.
"Migrants at Risk: How U.S. Policies Facilitate Human Trafficking." Dissent Online. March 24, 2014.
"Life Beyond Trafficking." Contexts. The American Sociological Association. 13(1): 2014.
"Securing Rights and Seeking Justice in the U.S. Deportation Regime." Scholar and Feminist Online. 11(1-2): 2013.
"Securing Migrants' Rights as Anti-Trafficking Work," in Rethinking Human Trafficking. Occasional Paper Series, Middle East Program & United States Studies: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. 2010.
Brennan, Denise. "Ending Forced Labor by Securing Immigrant Workers’ Rights." Centerpoint. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. December 3, 2009.
"Of Human Bondage," review of E. Benjamin Skinner's A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery. The Washington Post. June 12, 2008.
Articles in Journals:
"The Damage Wrought: Immigration Before, Under, and After Trump,” Alvarez Almendariz, Xitlalli, Denise Brennan, and Gabrielle Oliveira. Hot Spots, Fieldsights, October 19. 2021 https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/the-damage-wrought-immigration-before-under-and-after-trump
"Weaponizing Trafficking: Building a Bureaucratic Wall," Hot Spots, Fieldsights, October 19. 2021. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/weaponizing-trafficking-building-a-bureaucratic-wall
“Magical Thinking.” review of Sally Engle Merry’s The Seduction of Quantification. American Anthropologist. February 18, 2019.
“Undocumented People (En)Counter Border Policing: Near and Far from the US Border,” inaugural issue Migration and Society: Advances in Research 1 (1): 156-163. 2018.
“Moving Forward: Life after Trafficking.” Anti-Trafficking Review. Issue 10: 1-12. 2018.
“Fighting Human Trafficking Today: Moral Panics, Zombie Data, and the Seduction of Rescue,.” Wake Forest Law Review 52(2): 477-496. 2017.
Brennan, Denise and Citlalli Alvarez Almendariz. "Life without Papers as a State of Emergency in the Trump Era." LASA Forum. 48 (3): 24-29. 2017.
Brennan, Denise. "Myths Meet Reality: How We are Not Fighting Trafficking or Supporting Trafficking Survivors." New York Law School Law Review. 60 (3&4): 605-613. 2016. (Special Issue: Innovations in the Fight against Human Trafficking).
Brennan, Denise. "Trafficking, Scandal, and Abuse of Migrant Workers in Argentina and the United States." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 653 (1):107-123. 2014.
Brennan, Denise. "Thoughts on Finding and Assisting Individuals in Forced Labor in the USA." Sexualities 13(2): 139-152. 2010.
Brennan, Denise. "Key Issues in the Resettlement of Formerly Trafficked Persons in the United States." University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Special Edition: “Trafficking in Sex and Labor: Domestic and International Responses. 158.(6): 1581-1608. 2010.
Brennan, Denise. "Competing Claims of Victimhood? : Foreign and Domestic 'Victims' of Trafficking in the United States." Sexuality Research and Social Policy 5(4): 45-61. 2008.
Brennan, Denise. "Methodological Challenges in Research on Human Trafficking: Tales from the Field." International Migration 43(1/2): 35-54. 2005.
Brennan, Denise. "Women Work, Men Sponge and Everyone Gossips: Macho Men and Stigmatized/ing Women in A Sex Tourist Town." Anthropological Quarterly 77(4): 705-33. 2004.
--- Reprinted in Genre, Sexualité & Société as “Des Femmes, des hommes et des rumeurs. Hommes machos et femmes stigmatisées/antes dans une ville de tourisme sexuel.” Paris, France. 5 (spring). 2011.
Brennan, Denise. "Tourism in Transnational Places: Dominican Sex Workers and German Sex Tourists Imagine One Another." Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 7(4): 621-663. 2001.
Chapters in Books:
Brennan, Denise. "Love Trumps Hate: Community Caretaking in the Shadow of the Border Wall." Crisis under Critique: How People Assess, Transform and Respond to Critical Situations, edited by Didier Fassin and Axel Honneth, New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.
Brennan, Denise. "Subjectivity of Coercion: Workers' Experiences with Trafficking in the United States." Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labor, and Modern Slavery. Ed. Kotiswaran, Prabha. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2017.
Brennan, Denise. "Sex Worker Activism and Labor." Global Latin America. Eds. Gutmann, Matthew and Jeffrey Lesser. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2016.
Brennan, Denise. "Treading Water: Life After Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States." Human Trafficking Reconsidered: Migration and Forced Labor . Eds. Hoang, Kimberly Kay and Rhacel Parrenas. : Open Society Institute and International Debate Education Association. 2014.
Brennan, Denise. "Sex Tourism, Globalization, and Transnational Imagining." Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Eds. Brettell, Caroline B. and Carolyn F. Sargent. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, Inc. 2013.
--- Seventh edition. Abingdon: Routledge. 2017.
Brennan, Denise. "Sex Tourism and Women's Economic Opportunities in a Globalized Economy." Sex For Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry. Second Edition. Ed. Ronald Weitzer. New York and London: Routledge. 2009.
Brennan, Denise. "Love Work in Sex Work (and After): Performing at Love." Between Love and Sex: Intimacies in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Ed. William Jankowiak. New York: Columbia University Press. 2008.
Brennan, Denise. "Love Work in a Tourist Town: Dominican Sex Workers and Resort Workers Perform at Love." Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World. Ed. Padilla, Mark B. et al.. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. 2007.
Brennan, Denise. "When Sex Tourists and Sex Workers Meet: Encounters within Sosúa, the Dominican Republic’s Sexscape." Tourists and Tourism. Ed. Sharon Gmelch. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. 2003.
--- Third Edition. Gmelch, Sharon and Adam Kaul, Eds. 2018.
Brennan, Denise. "Selling Sex for Visas: Sex Tourism as Stepping Stone to International Migration for Dominican Women." Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. Eds. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild. New York: Metropolitan Books. 2002.
Brennan, Denise. "Globalization, Women’s Labor and Men’s Pleasure: Sex Tourism in Sosúa, the Dominican Republic." Urban Life: Readings in Urban Anthropology. Eds. George Gmelch and Walter P. Zenner. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. 2002.
Articles in Conference Proceedings
Brennan, Denise. "Securing Migrants’ Rights as Anti-Trafficking Work." Rethinking Human ’Trafficking’. Ed. Occasional Paper Series, Middle East Program & United States Studies . Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2010.