Scholarly Collaboration & Programming
From the Director
Dear Colleagues:
As 2008, begins, the IHRC is actually mid-way through its academic cycle of exciting activities, many with an international or interdisciplinary focus.
The Global REM Seminar, begun in September 2007, continues with a full program of seminars for Winter and Spring 2008. Many of our Research in Progress (RIP) seminars will also have an international focus or will highlight the work of international visitors working in our collections, notably Anna Mazurkiewicz (from Poland) and Matteo Pretelli from Italy). Although all Global REM events appear on the IHRC website, an enhanced Global REM website will also soon be available for those seeking more detail about the activities of this expanding and interdisciplinary initiative. After two years of hearing requests from non-resident colleagues who wished to have better access to events at the IHRC, we are finally able to respond positively. The Global REM website will feature videos of selected REM seminars!
Joining Anna Mazurkiewicz (holder of a Kosciuszko Fellowship for 2007-2008) and Matteo Pretelli (holder of a Fulbright fellowship for Spring 2008) as post-doctoral scholars at the IHRC will be Sonia Cancian, who recently received her Ph.D. from Concordia University in Montreal. Sonia comes to the IHRC with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
April 17-19, IHRC and the Institute for Global Studies will sponsor a major international conference at the IHRC, titled “Membership, Belonging and Mobility in Global History.” Sociologist Rogers Brubaker from UCLA will open the conference with a plenary address. An interdisciplinary group of historians, archaeologists and art historians from east and west Asia, Africa, New Zealand and Europe will compare rules governing mobility and the inclusion or exclusion of outsiders in societies not organized as national states. Panels will examine case studies of ancient, classical and early modern empires and city states on all regions of the world; others will focus on the meaning of membership among both mobile and more sedentary indigenous peoples, past and present. Implicit in these comparisons are important questions about how and why national states have chosen to restrict migrations in their pursuit of national unity and harmony in more recent times.
A symposium on Gender Ratios and Global Migrations, to be held at the IHRC and the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) in June, just before the opening of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, will close a full year of IHRC activities. Experts from Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia will join University of Minnesota scholars in critiquing the first results of research that has used MPC IPUMs data to describe male- and female-dominated migration flows over the past 150 years. Why were the migrations of the nineteenth century almost universally male-dominated? Why do women and men migrate in more nearly equal numbers today? The symposium will consider how the many disciplines involved in migration studies might suggest drastically different answers for these two simple and related questions.
At the University of Minnesota, the study of migration has long provided a way to connect the histories of Minnesota, the United States, and the world. Several new projects at the IHRC will in the semester ahead seek to call attention to the long history of immigration studies at Minnesota (CREATE LINK TO DG ‘Minnesota” PAPER), to the special role of the Minnesota Iron Range in the history and development of the IHRC (CREATE LINK TO DANIEL’s WORK) and to the pioneering work of Minnesota specialists in the development of the field of refugee studies (http://www.ihrc.umn.edu/research/vitrage/all/ra/ihrc2968.html).
Please do check our homepage for more information about these and other upcoming developments. Or stop into our suite of offices at 311 Andersen Library.
With best wishes,
Donna R. Gabaccia,
Director, IHRC
Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration: Connecting Past and Present
Immigration. It's a hot topic. And a focus of scholarship, teaching and debate at the University of Minnesota since the 1920s. This semester IHRC intern and history major Dan Ott returns to the IHRC to help coordinate and produce this unique, weekly feature of our homepage. Visit our homepage for thoughtful and provocative perspectives by University faculty and graduate students on this week’s migration news. We challenge you to read and to think. Read Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration
Beginning in Spring 2007, assistant curator Daniel Necas has responded to these faculty- and student-authored columns on contemporary immigration by digging into the IHRC Research Collections. See how the documents housed in the IHRC research collections link past and present.