Graduate Student Projects
Allison Adrian (School of Music, adri0032@umn.edu)
Allison is a PhD candidate in musicology/ethnomusicology at the University's School of Music. She obtained her master's degree from UCLA in ethnomusicology, writing a thesis that explored gender and memory in Basque American musical performance. Her dissertation focuses on Lutheran worship music and new immigrants in the Twin Cities. She recently created an exhibit with artist Wing Huie that documents this topic using photographs, hymnals, and audio-visual documentation illustrating the changing musical landscape of the church.
Erika Busse (Sociology Dept., buss0101@umn.edu)
Erika Busse is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology where she works with professors Elizabeth Boyle and Douglas Hartmann. Busse obtained her B.A. in Sociology and Gender Studies in Peru (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú), and earned her master’s degree from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, where she examined the gendered paths followed by displaced bilingual peasant women in the Peruvian Andes during the armed conflict in Peru in their pursuit for recognition. Her dissertation “Threads in the Transnational Family Fabric: Peruvian Women’s Role in Interweaving Gender and Ethnicity” focuses on families’ reorganization under transnationalism and the role of family as a primary site of socialization in migrations. Mainly focusing on women, it also analyzes men engaging in activities that contribute to the development of ties across households and borders. A multi-site project that involves participants in Paterson, NJ and in five cities in Peru, Busse’s research entails interviewing several members of the same families in all sites, for which she draws on in-depth interviews and participant observation. She has also traveled back and forth between the U.S. and Peru between 2006 and 2007 following the interviewees’ social remittances.
Kelly Condit-Shrestha (History Dept., cond0092@umn.edu)
Kelly is a Ph. D. student in the Department of History. Her research interests include Cold War culture, U.S. migration and family history, and Asian American Studies; her work focuses on the history of transnational Asian adoption in the U.S.
Jay Ketner (Dept. of French & Italian, ketn0002@umn.edu)
Jay is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of French & Italian. His research interests center upon francophone migrant literature of the Caribbean and Quebec. Specifically, he is interested in understanding notions of home, and how "home" is transformed and altered through migration. While the term "home" can allude to many things, his work focuses on home as understood through the migrant lens of native country/place of origin, host society, as well as a migrant subject's personal sense of "home" or "homespace". Jay's dissertation explores how (im)migration and migrant literature has forced us to rethink the notion of home in Quebec, as well as how migrants' perception of their native homes change as they establish roots in Quebec.
David LaVigne (History Dept., lavig004@umn.edu )
David is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History. His research interests focus on the racial and ethnic identities of southern and eastern European immigrants and the processes of their incorporation in the United States. His dissertation analyzes the meaning of race and ethnicity on Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range, with analysis both of racial discrimination directed at southern and eastern European immigrants in the early twentieth century and the role of the white ethnic revival in redefining these groups’ position in the United States.
Johanna Leinonen (History Dept., lein0085@umn.edu)
Johanna is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History. Her dissertation examines the families formed through marriages between Finns and Americans living in either the U.S. or Finland. The purpose is to find out if marriage and family formation has become a more prominent element of international migrations of Finns and Americans in the 20th century and if so, when and why this has been the case. The study also acknowledges the impact of borders in the transnational family formation, exploring how policies and laws on migration and marriage of the two nation-states influence the formation of transnational marriages. More specifically, by looking at marriage migration, the study will examine how national/ethnic/racial boundaries of the nation are drawn through the law. How do different national understandings of the family and the nation shape state policies in these two countries? Because the study explores the marriage migration of white, middle-class, mostly professional immigrants, the categories of gender, race, and class will be at the center of the analysis. Specifically, the research asks: what roles do gender, race, and class play in regulations on migration and marriage?
Lisong Liu (History Dept., liux0366@umn.edu)
Lisong got his B.A. in Chinese history in China and is now a Ph.D. candidate studying post-1965 American immigration and international migration. His dissertation, “Mobility, Community and Identity: Chinese Migration to the U.S. and Transnational Citizenship, 1978 to present,” studies historical changes of post-1965 American immigration— the increasing preference for skilled migrants in immigration laws and policies and the growing numbers of professionals among recent immigrants. Charting these changes through the case of mainland Chinese student-turned immigrants, this dissertation examines the historical context of their migration to and community formation in the U.S. and reconceptualizes “immigration” and “citizenship” in a transnational context.
Michelle Los (History Dept., losxx001@umn.edu)
Michelle Los is currently working on a MA thesis focusing on the discourse surrounding guest workers in Dortmund, Germany from the recruitment stop in 1973 until German unification in 1990. I have previously done work on German-language Turkish literature and am hoping to unify both the literary and newspaper perspectives into a cohesive understanding of how both guest workers and Germans understood terms like integration, citizenship, as well as other concepts of belonging.
Masako Nakamura (History Dept., naka0095@umn.edu)
Masako is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History. Her dissertation explores the migration and integration of Japanese wives of U.S. servicemen to the United States to examine changing American and Japanese conceptions of race, family, and citizenship during and after the U.S. occupation of Japan. More specifically, the dissertation examines how international forces played out in shaping the knowledge of Japanese "war brides" and their international and interracial marriages via diverse sites and venues such as laws, legal cases, schools, popular culture, and social science. She hopes that it will provide a case study to explore how U.S. military involvement in East Asia from 1945 through the 1950s led to a transition of U.S. racial formation, immigration laws, and nation-state building, and how immigrants lived in the transition.
Kim Park Nelson (Dept. of American Studies, greg0051@umn.edu)
Kim is a scholar and educator of Korean adoption, Asian American Studies, American race relations, and American Studies. Between 2003 and 2006, she collected 73 oral histories from Korean adoptees in the United States and the around the world. She also developed and taught the first college course on Korean adoption in the United States. Her Ph.D. dissertation is titled "Korean Looks, American Eyes: Korean American Adoptees, Race, Culture and Nation." This research explores the many identities of adult Korean adoptees, as well as the cultural, social, historical and political significance of over 50 years of Korean adoption to the United States.
SooJin Pate (Dept. of American Studies, link0039@umn.edu)
SooJin is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies. She received her M.A. in English, specializing in African American literature at Howard University. Her main areas of interest are African American and Asian American literature and film, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies. Her dissertation entitled "Making Adoptees, Making Art: Korean Adoption and Korean Adoptee Cinema and Literature" examines how economic, political, and social formations cultivated not only Korean adoption but also the cultural and artistic responses of Korean adoptee filmmakers and writers.
Bryan D. Pekel (Dept. of History)
My MA thesis research explores mid-nineteenth century British emigration to the Australian colonies using gender as a tool for analysis. The existing historiography has tended to either exclude gender, thereby offering a singular migratory experience, or when it had engaged gender, has focused on the experiences of women. By focusing on issues of masculinity, however, my research allows for an understanding of the ways in which Antipodean emigration helped shape and responded to the larger debates of radical politics and artisanal enfranchisement within Britain. Additionally, placing emphasis on masculinity enhances our understandings of the complexities and multiplicities of the migration experience.
Jeannie Natsuko Shinozuka (History Dept., shin0129@umn.edu)
I am a sixth-year Ph.D. student in the History Department. My dissertation examines how migrating plants, insects, bodies, and pathogens from Japan evolved from a “contagious yellow peril” in late nineteenth century California into a “poisonous yellow peril” which needed to be “quarantined” by the Second World War. My research then highlights how Japanese American agriculturalists’ resisted, in addition to the community’s larger struggle to build their own health care system during the first half of the twentieth century. I have also taught courses on migrant women’s autobiographies and contemporary Asian American communities.
Jasmine Kar Tang (Dept. of American Studies, jkt@umn.edu)
Jasmine Kar Tang is a student in the American Studies Ph.D. program. Her research interests involve post-1965 Asian American racial formations to east Tennessee, particularly involving Asian migrant scientists working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the wake of the cold war.
Andy Urban (History Dept., urba0090@umn.edu)
Andy is a PhD candidate in U.S. History at the University of Minnesota, where he works with professors Donna Gabaccia and Erika Lee. Andy received his BA degree in History from Middlebury College, and worked at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan prior to entering graduate school. His dissertation focuses on Irish and Chinese immigrants in the United States during the second part of nineteenth century, and how the participation of Irish and Chinese immigrants in the occupation of domestic service contributed to how these two groups were perceived racially and linked in the minds of native-born Americans.
Andy has worked as an instructor and graduate assistant for the undergraduate public history course the last two years, which has created museum exhibitions exploring topics in local history pertaining to the neighborhoods of Cedar-Riverside and Dinkytown. In addition to teaching public history, Andy is currently working on a museum exhibition with Jeff Manuel that explores the career and legacy of former Minneapolis Mayor, Charles Stenvig, who was elected on a conservative “law and order” platform in 1969. This exhibit will open in March 2007 at the Andersen Library Gallery at the University of Minnesota.
Her Vang (History Dept., vang0681@umn.edu)
Her Vang is a Ph. D. candidate in the Department of History. He received an M.A. in Theology, with an emphasis in Justice and Peace Studies, from the Iliff School of Theology and M.A. in International Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame. A refugee from Laos his main areas of interest include comparative race and ethnicity, transnational political and social movements, migration and diaspora, and postcolonial studies. His dissertation, "Dreaming of Home, Dreaming of Land: Race and Nation in the Displacement and Politics of the Hmong people from the late nineteenth century to the outset of the twenty first century. Specifically, it examines how different generations of Hmong political actors responded to and had fought to make the dream of reality ever since. Charting their politics and migration across generation, this dissertation illustrates how stateless people, like the Hmong, might engage in politics differently from those people ties to a state, how they understand what politics, home, and homeland are, as well as how ideologies of race and nation work to include some but exclude others in the construction of modern states, shape the immigration and refugee policies of first asylum and resettlement countries, and ultimately, influence the de-diasporization or return migration of the diaspora.
