About the IHRC

Welcome to the IHRC, an interdisciplinary research center in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota.

Founded in 1965, the IHRC promotes research on international migration with a special emphasis on immigrant and refugee life in the U.S.

The IHRC sponsors seminars, lectures and workshops that bring a highly specialized and multi-disciplinary group of University of Minnesota researchers into dialogue with their national and international peers, with university and high school students and their teachers, with journalists, photographers and filmmakers, and with communities of immigrants and ethnic Americans.

The IHRC especially seeks to enrich contemporary debates about international migration—so often heated, emotional, and unrelated to facts—from historical and scholarly perspectives.

In 2007-2009, the IHRC collaborated with the Institute for Global Studies to offer a special series of events called Global REM (Race, Ethnicity, and Migration). The seminars were videotaped and captioned. The seminars continue to present (events).
In 2009-2010 the research project Minnesota 2.0 was undertaken to document and understand how 1.5 and 2nd generation Mexican, Somali, and Hmong youth use social networking sites to express their emerging sense of identity and social connection – to Minnesota and the U.S., to their parents and communities, to each other, and to the homelands from which their families arrived.
Research projects for 2010-2011 were "Sheeko" (oral histories with Somali youth) and Digitizing Immigrant Letters (continuing).

The IHRC is proud to have built one of the largest and most important collections of materials documenting U.S. immigration and refugee life to be found anywhere in the world. It yearly welcomes not only student and faculty researchers from the University and from Minnesota communities but researchers from a wide variety of disciplines from North America and the wider world.

IHRC’s website was designated an iGuide website in 2007 by the online Encyclopedia Brittanica. Here, you will find immediate access to our collections, to information about upcoming events, to faculty- and student-authored commentary on contemporary immigration issues, and links to recent news articles. (Listen to the news release.) Explore the IHRC website for information about upcoming events and classes at the University of Minnesota, an introduction to the IHRC affiliated faculty and its community-based support group the “Friends of the IHRC,” and for information about workshops, conferences and research projects of the IHRC.

Explore and enjoy!

About the IHRC

Welcome to the IHRC, an interdisciplinary research center in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota.

Related Links

Events