Graduate Student Projects
Allison Adrian (School of Music, adri0032@umn.edu)
Allison is a professor of music at St. Catherine University in St. Paul. She earned her PhD in musicology/ethnomusicology at the University of Minnesota's School of Music and her master's degree from UCLA in ethnomusicology. Her dissertation focused on Lutheran worship music and new immigrants in the Twin Cities. She also created an exhibit with artist Wing Huie that uses photographs to document this topic. She is currently the music curator for Huie's latest work: The University Avenue Project.
James Patrick Brown (Dept. of American Studies, brow1969@umn.edu)
James Patrick Brown is researching the uses of the 19th century American literary canon by anarchists who immigrated to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For many anarchist immigrants--Emma Goldman most famously among them--American traditions of individualism and minimal government were precursors to what they saw as America's coming future, one in which government would be dissolved and replaced by cooperative communes that would let the individual flourish. Focusing on anarchist appropriations of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular, I am arguing that immigrant anarchist uses of American literature ask us to rethink the political implications of individualism in American literature and life. While contemporary critics writing from various Marxist perspectives argue that individualism in American literature is a bourgeois ideology most associated with the right wing, anarchist uses of this ideology to "naturalize" anarchism in an American context suggest an historical tradition of left wing individualism ranging from writers like Thoreau and Emerson to the Beat writers of the 1950s and the New Left critics of the 1960s.
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.
Johanna Leinonen (History Dept., lein0085@umn.edu)
Johanna is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History. Her dissertation examines marriage and family life among transatlantic migrants in the 20th century, using marriages between Finns and Americans in Finland and the U.S. as a case study. The dissertation brings together the study of international migration, immigration law, and family formation to show how international marriages are part of a long history of international migration, globalization, and nation states’ efforts to use immigration and nationality laws to limit or encourage transnational family formation. The three key questions are: First, have international marriages increased in response to changes in immigration laws? Second, how have highly industrialized countries like Finland and the U.S. incorporated intermarried families of highly mobile, white, and usually middle-class persons into their discussions of immigration and multiculturalism? Finally, do intermarried Finns and Americans develop different transnational family patterns and national/ethnic identities when settled in a traditional nation of immigrants (the U.S.) compared to a country new to immigration (Finland)?
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.
Mark Magnuson (Geography, magn0136@umn.edu)
Mark Magnuson is working towards a MGIS degree within the Geography Department and has received a M.A. in History from Stockholm University. His work is in Historical GIS and Demography with an interest in 19th century urban spatial social stratification, specifically in American cities with significant Swedish immigration and Swedish cities with migrant labor. Currently, his focus is analyzing and visualizing Minneapolis as a stage in which individuals and communities secure a hierarchy of space, either by their design or default, in order to define and reinforce social, economic and cultural norms. Urban address-rich sources such as city directories, censuses, church and organizational roles, and local narratives, provide a historical framework of the impact of migration on the spatial development of modern cities.
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 (History Dept.)
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.
Leonore Phillips (Anthropology Dept.)
Leonore Phillips is working on her Ph.D in the Anthropology Department, focusing on cultural and linguistic anthropology. She will begin her ethnographic fieldwork project in Berlin in 2010 and focuses on the paradoxes surrounding labor migration to Germany by looking at how desires for national technological innovation and progress become intertwined with discourses around xenophobia, new "guest workers" and the position of Germany within the EU. To do this, her dissertation research explores the experiences of highly skilled and highly educated immigrants in technological, scientific or engineering fields in Berlin and focuses on the changes in German and European immigration since 2000, which indicate both willingness and reluctance to allow immigrants to supplement the shrinking workforces in engineering and technology industries.
Kristin Shardlow (College of Design, hell0177@umn.edu)
Kristin is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Design, Housing, and Apparel, where she is a research assistant to Dr. Tasoulla Hadjiyanni. Under Dr. Hadjiyanni, she has worked to better understand the meaning and importance of Culturally Sensitive Design to Minnesota’s minority populations with regards to the home space. This experience has helped support Kristin’s own area of dissertation research, which is looking at how Mexican immigrants are using urban public spaces to reflect their cultural identities and aspirations. As a design researcher, Kristin is seeking to understand how publicly displayed Mexican cultural aesthetics, including symbols, signs, graphics, colors, objects, etc., are effectively mediating immigrants’ transition to Minnesota society and American civic life.
Jasmine Kar Tang (Dept. of American Studies, jkt@umn.edu)
Jasmine Kar Tang is a Ph.D. candidate in American studies. Her dissertation research involves post-1965 Asian migration to the U.S. South.
Adriano Udani (Dept. of Political Science)
My dissertation is entitled “Disrupting Americanism? The Re-Presentation of Noncitizens in Policymaking.” I am interested in the following question: Why do U.S. elected officials represent noncitizens such as immigrants, refugees, and asylees? I argue that elected officials represent noncitizens by “re-presenting” their identities when crafting welfare and criminal rights policies. I examine the variation of state policy enactments following the 1996 federal welfare and immigration reforms. Following federal reforms, American states adopted their own welfare eligibility rules and criminal rights protections for noncitizens, which afforded noncitizens different rights and privileges as American members. My project is based mainly on a nationally representative dataset, collected between 1997 and 2008, which combines annual state socioeconomic and political indicators with data from a discourse analysis of state bills on welfare eligibility and criminal rights. My preliminary results show that elected officials collectively re-present noncitizens as persons who are either criminals or are required to assimilate into a singular and exclusive American culture. However, I am currently examining at an individual-level whether legislators who are women of color, ethnic minorities within racial groups, or members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) community re-present noncitizens in order to challenge how American identity is defined.
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.
Elizabeth Venditto (History Dept., vendi002@umn.edu)
Elizabeth Venditto is a Ph.D student in the Department of History. Her work focuses on contemporary migration in the Mediterranean, specifically the exchanges between North Africa and Southern Europe.
Elizabeth Zanoni (History Dept., zano0011@umn.edu)
Elizabeth Zanoni is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department. She is interested in links between the movement of people and products and how migration has historically shaped meanings and practices of consumption. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Geographies of Consumption and Migration: Commercial and Migratory Links between Italy, the U.S., and Argentina during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,” explores how Italian merchant entrepreneurs and the products they sold to consumers in New York and Buenos Aires transformed consumer practices and migration experiences in the Atlantic political economy between 1880 and 1940. She is particularly interested in identifying how Italian migrants abroad constructed competing and changing meanings of nationalism, ethnicity, and gender through the products they sold, purchased, and consumed. Her dissertation investigates how and why commercial and migratory links played out differently in New York and Buenos Aires; how the production of “Italian-style” commodities in New York and Buenos Aires by Italian migrants transformed the consumer habits and identities of non-Italian consumers; and whether transnational associations between Italians and Italian products directed trade and/or migration between New York and Buenos Aires. Elizabeth is more generally interested in the ways in which cultural meanings evolve from and influence economic activity. She is advised by Donna Gabaccia and Erika Lee.
