Affiliated Scholars
The University of Minnesota has a long history of studying immigration as a formative element of American life. Today the university and its surrounding region are home to one of the largest, interdisciplinary clusters of scholar/teacher/student experts on immigration, race and ethnicity, and plural nations anywhere in the middle of the continent.
Interested in becoming an affiliated scholar? Follow the guidelines.
The IHRC is proud to list as affiliated scholars:
Elizabeth Boyle, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Read more
Sonia Cancian, Ph.D. Concordia University, Montreal, Read More
M. Bianet Castellano, Assistant Professor, Department of American Studies
Katherine Fennelly, Professor, Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota
Donna R. Gabaccia, Professor of History, University of Minnesota
Douglas Hartmann, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota
Franca Iacovetta, Professor of History, University of Toronto, Read more
Daniel Karvonen Lecturer, Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch, University of Minnesota
Michael Lansing, History Department, Augsburg College
Erika Lee, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Minnesota
Helga Leitner, Professor, Department of Geography, University of Minnesota
Anna Mazurkiewicz, Ph.D. of the University of Gdansk, Poland, a Kosciuszko Foundation Scholar, Read more
Louis Mendoza, Chair, Chicano Studies, University of Minnesota
Matteo Pretelli, Ph.D. Trieste University, Italy, Read more
Eric D. Weitz, Professor and Chair of History and Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair in the College of Liberal Arts
Bogusia Wojciechowska, working on 'The Polish Diaspora 1939-50'
Michelle Wright, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Minnesota
Additional Information of Scholars
In her work, Professor Boyle has explored cultural contradictions between the international system and local cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, and between dominant American culture and African migrant communities’ cultures. In Female Genital Cutting: Cultural Conflict in the Global Community (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), Professor Boyle considered the problem of democratically representing local culture in politics that are increasingly global. More recently, she has studied the political integration of members of African diasporic communities in the United States. Unequal power relations in the global system form the backdrop for this work as well as for her other current project on children’s rights in the global system. Professor Boyle’s work has appeared in the Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, Social Forces, the American Sociological Review, International Sociology, the International Journal of Comparative Sociology, and other journals. Her work has received financial support from the United States National Science Foundation, a University of Minnesota Presidential Multicultural Faculty Research Award, the McKnight Foundation, and the University of Minnesota Life Course Center.
As postdoctoral fellow, Sonia Cancian will be exploring the correlations between oral history and family letters as sources of social memory in migration studies. Building on her doctoral research that examines at a micro-level the private letters of six Italian families exchanged in postwar Italy and Canada, this research aims to compare and contrast two key sources of memory relating to the migration experiences of Italian postwar migration to Canada. The Italy-Canada migration movement following the Second World War is a key example in migration history of the large transatlantic “highway” that involved the highly intense movement of people, objects, letters, news, information, and networks. In just over two decades, over 440,000 men and women boarded ships heading for Canada, leaving behind an enormous void in their families, and communities back home. By analytically comparing and contrasting the textual memories of family letters of Italian immigrants and their families in Canada and Italy with the contemporary living memories of Italian men and women in both countries, this research project, “Moving Stories: Family Letters, Oral History and the Social Memory of Migration,” examines how each source of memory connected to migration experiences is related to the re/construction of the past. It argues that the migration experiences retrieved through private, family letters and oral history methodologies impel us to tap into a significant empirical source that needs to be archived and analysed for its singular contribution in providing a deep understanding of the human ramifications in migration as a social process. Through the analysis of these sources, I will be investigating the consistent and changing elements connected to the emotional making-sense processes, kin network movements, gender norms and gender relations, human agency, and hopes and dreams, as they are inherently connected to migration experiences. The time to recover these historical accounts is now. As time elapses, the interview possibilities with postwar Italian immigrants who arrived in Canada nearly 50 years ago and the availability of their letters are dwindling, thus contributing to the fast disappearance of this reservoir of memory. Sonia Cancian will begin her postdoctoral research at the Immigration History Research Center in January 2008.
Iacovetta is primarily a Canadian social historian whose research has focussed on the strategies and experiences of ordinary and marginal subjects, especially immigrant working- class men and women, and how they have dealt with other groups, including elites and knowledge-based professionals, who have tried to regulate or reshape their lives. She has explored how a range of marginal or “transgressive” subjects - including Italian construction workers, interned enemy aliens, East European refugees, Italian women radical exiles, Canadian “delinquent girls,” and abused immigrant wives - confronted, circumvented, or fell victim to the more powerful in society, and how they sought, often through a mix of resistance and accommodation to dominant norms and institutions, to carve out meaningful lives for themselves and their families. Her scholarship has been situated at the intersection of three major sub-fields of social history - women and gender, working-class, and immigrant history. While focussed mainly on Canada, her research has engaged North American and international literatures and has highlighted the comparative and broader contexts involved, including the European context, Canada-US comparisons with respect to immigration, cross-border labour movements, and the Cold War, and the transnational nature of migration and workers’ militancy and radicalism.
She is the author of two monographs: Such Hard-working People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (1992) and Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (2006). She is the co-editor of eight volumes, including: Gender Conflicts (1992); On the Case: Explorations in Social History (1999); Enemies Within: Italian and Other Wartime Internees in Canada and Abroad (2000) and Women, Gender and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World with Donna Gabaccia (2002). Her current book project is Remaking Lives and Communities: The International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto in North American Context, 1940s-1970s. She is also involved in a collaborative project in Canadian food history and continues to carry out research on Italian anarchist poet and radical exile Virgilia D’Adrea. She is a former editor of Atlantis, a leading Women’s Studies journal in Canada. She has contributed to public history through her role as a founding member of the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton, Ontario. A co-authored project on Angelina Napolitano, an Italian woman who killed her abusive husband in northern Ontario in 1911, became the basis for a recent feature length film, Looking for Angelina (Platinum Films, Canada).
Professor Mazurkiewicz is doing research on the role of the Assembly of the Captive European Nations in the American policy of containing communism. The intriguing ACEN's structure, which was designed to mirror that of the U.N., indicates an attempt to form an alternative "captive nations" representation. Why the combined effort of nine East European countries did not cause the emergence of one of the strongest lobbying groups in the U.S.? In combination with U.S. government's generous founding, it is worth deliberating whether ACEN was established in order to serve some cold war policy goal. By the means of a careful examination of source material one may find yet another, uncovered page of the U.S. policy of containment. Moreover, a detailed study of ACEN's activities may depict anew the Eastern Europe's place in the American cold war policy and answer the question on ACEN's effectiveness in its war against communism.
Pretelli graduated at the University of Florence, Italy with a degree of Political Science. Pretelli then continued his schooling at the University of Trieste, Italy where he gained his Ph. D. in history. In his research, Pretelli focuses on the history of Italian emigration to the United States Italian immigrants' relations with Italy, mainly with the interwar period, and the Italian cultural diplomacy.
