Nora Faires

Nora Faires

Dr. Nora Faires

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. 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, ed.

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.

Recently I have given invited presentations at Duke University, Michigan State University, the University of Calgary, the University of Toronto, and York University.

Other Professional Activities

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 also serve on the Vincent P. DeSantis Prize Committee of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. I chair the Urban History Association's committee to select the Best Book in Non-North American Urban History.

 

 

Department of History
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo MI 49008-5334 USA
(269) 387-4650 | (269) 387-4651 Fax
hist_wmu@wmich.edu