I am a social and cultural historian of migration, studying the intersections of ethnicity, race, gender, class, and religion in the United States and Canada. I served as Fulbright Distinguished Chair at York University (Canada) from January through June 2008.
Teaching
I teach the undergraduate
surveys of recent United States history and of American women's history.
I am introducing a course on the cultural history of Canada-U. S. relations.
Graduate courses include seminars on migration and gender in modern
North America and on historiograpy. Jointly appointed with the Gender and Women's Studies
Program, I offer a course on "Women and Work."
Scholarship
I have co-authored two prize-winning
books. Permeable Border: The Great Lakes Basin as Transnational Region,
1650-1990 received the 2006 Albert B. Corey Prize, awarded jointly
and biennially by the American Historical Association and Canadian Historical
Association for the best book on Canada-U.S. relations or the history
of both countries and the 2008 Association for Borderlands Studies Nominee
Award. Jewish Life in the Industrial Promised Land, 1855-2005
received a 2006 State History Award from the Historical Society of Michigan
and was a Finalist for a 2006 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY).
I guest edited two special issues on "Borderlands" for the Michigan Historical Review which appeared in Spring and Fall 2008. Recent essays include "’Talented and Charming Strangers from Across the Line’: Gendered Nationalism, Class Privilege, and the American Woman’s Club of Calgary," in One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus (University of Alberta Press) and "Conversion as a 'Two-Edged Sword': Evangelicalism among Pittsburgh's German Immigrants," in German Diasporic Experiences: Identity, Migration, and Loss.
I also am writing The
Splintered Cross: Sectarianism and Ideology among German Immigrants
in Pittsburgh 1782-1877, for which I received a grant from the WMU
Faculty Research and Creative Activities Support Fund. Other projects
include working with Janet L. Coryell on a textbook entitled Women
and America: An Integrated History; coediting, with Dirk Hoerder,
Migrants and Migration in Modern North America: Cross-Border Life Courses,
Labor Markets, and Politics in Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the
United States; and coediting, with Melanie Shell-Weiss, Reporting
on Immigrants, Restricting Immigration: Legacies and Lessons of the
Dillingham Commission.
This year I will present papers at conferences of the Social Science History Association (Long Beach), the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States (San Diego) and the European Social Science History Conference (Ghent)
I chair WMU's interdisciplinary
Canadian Studies initiative, for which I have written successful grant
proposals. I am a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of
American Ethnic History and the Michigan Historical Review.
I serve as chair of the Urban Hisgtory Association's committee to select the Best Book in Non-North American Urban History and on the committee jointly appointed by the American Historical Association and Canandian Historiacal Association to award the Albert B. Corey Prize.
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