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.
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