Center for the History of the New America

See the latest list of Immigrant Studies Courses available for Fall 2013 here.

WHO ARE WE?

The Center for the History of the New America aims to make the University of Maryland the hub for understanding the long immigration history of this country, from 1500 to the present, and its connections to world history.

The Center will provide a distinctive institutional home for interdisciplinary and trans-national research, for training faculty and students, and for distributing information about the history of the immigrant experience to a broad public.

If you are interested in the study, the teaching, and the politics of the long history of immigration from a global perspective and want to learn more about The Center for the History of the New America at the University of Maryland you are in the right place!

Mission and Overview

Since 1965, legal and demographic changes have made the United States an immigrant society once again. Inspired by this fact, the Center for the History of the New America serves as the hub for understanding the long immigration history of this country, from 1500 to the present, and its connections to world history. The Center provides a distinctive institutional home for interdisciplinary research, for training faculty and students, and for distributing information about the history of the immigrant experience to a broad public.

During the last third of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, the United States has again become an immigrant society. In 1965 nearly half a century of immigration restriction ended, and people of foreign birth once again became a major presence in the United States. These new immigrants -- from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and Africa -- have transformed American society, giving it a different face, a different sound, a different taste. This "New America" demonstrates, more powerfully than ever, the deep interconnections between the American experience and the currents of global change. While globalization has led scholars and policymakers across the country to focus more attention on the place of the United States in the world, immigration puts a human face on the complex transformation reshaping that world. Immigration is, in short, one of the most significant and expressive links between American and world history. The Center for the History of a New America highlights these links as it brings together a global community of scholars, students, and policymakers to study the worldwide history of immigration.

The recently released 2010 decennial US census reported that immigrants and their children accounted for three-quarters of the decade's population growth. The presence of these new Americans powered the growth of the United States and changed the nation's politics, economy, and culture. But what can be said of the United States can be said of the world, because immigrants alter the societies they leave as well as the ones in which they arrive. In fact, the reconstruction of American society cannot be understood without examining how ongoing global changes in climate, economics, politics, and culture have set people in motion.

A global understanding of the new America demands historical knowledge. Immigration, by definition, is dynamic. It can no more be understood from one point in time than it can from one place. Contemporary patterns of movement necessarily draw on older, established ones. The New America thus reaches back to the first European and African arrivals on the American continent in the sixteenth century and even earlier, when global transformations joined Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Then, as now, newcomers carried the traditions, customs, and conventional wisdom of their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents with them. New societies develop as remnants of the past combine with aspirations for the future.

Across the nation there are many institutions -- universities, governmental agencies, and foundations -- that study immigration. Some focus on the politics of immigration, demanding immigration "reform," while others claim to be nonpartisan collectors of vital information regarding the contemporary immigrant experience. By taking the historical view, The Center places the changes set in motion by modern immigration within the largest context. For example, recent debates over who is to be welcomed and who is to be denied entry into the United States and how immigrants should be incorporated into American society echo similar controversies in the 1830s, the 1870s, and the 1920s.

So too with the central issue begged by the immigrant presence: exactly what is the essence of American society into which immigrants will be incorporated and the meaning of American citizenship they will embrace. Matters of acculturation of foreign-born people -- the transformation from immigrant to native -- and the generational change they spark are likewise as alive today as they were two or three centuries ago. In short, the experiences of the New America can only be understood in light of the history of an older America. Examining the connections between past and present will constitute the primary mission of the Center for the History of the New America and set it apart from all other entities that study immigration.

The Center demonstrates that expanding scholarly and popular understanding of the nation's immigrant past is critical to better comprehending the contemporary immigrant experience and America's future as a nation of nations. By exploring conditions in immigrants' countries of origin as well as their American experiences, the Center contributes mightily to globalizing understanding of the history of the United States. The Center provides a distinctive institutional home for interdisciplinary research, for training faculty and students, and for distributing information about the history of the immigrant experience to a broad public through academic publications, presentations, briefings, conferences, mass media, and the internet. It draws upon local expertise from sources in government, NGOs, and higher education throughout the Washington metropolitan region. It serves local, statewide, national, and international constituencies.

Born of discussions within the History Department, the Center has grown quickly. It received encouragement and material support from the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, the Vice President for Research, and the Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, who have supplied seed money to begin the Center's work. Those resources have allowed the Center to organize an Advisory Board and a small, part-time staff within the History Department. However, for the Center to fulfill its interdisciplinary aspirations, it will require support outside the Department of History and the University. The next task is that of outreach to attract new affiliates. Perhaps even more important, The Center will begin to construct a permanent staff. The aim is to give The Center an annual budget of $500,000 by 2015.

Second, the Center will pursue the history of immigration through teaching. It will expand the number of undergraduate courses that study immigration history. New undergraduate offerings will include a signature "I" course on "Immigration in Global Perspective," which, among other topics, will compare forced and free immigration, examine the role of immigrant entrepreneurs, and explore immigration and citizenship. A Scholarship in Practice capstone course will provide students with the opportunity to conduct oral histories of local immigrant communities and disseminate their findings in reports, web sites, and museum exhibits. Proposed graduate offerings will include readings courses such as "Immigration, Gender, and Citizenship" and "The History of the Economics of Immigration," while a research seminar on the history of immigrants and immigration will allow students to pursue their own independent research. All of these offerings will approach their subject from a transnational perspective.

In order to reach its teaching goals, the Center will offer fellowships in order to attract highly qualified young scholars. The University of Maryland's History Department already possesses considerable strength for this endeavor. Members of its current faculty specialize in understanding the forced immigration of enslaved and indentured peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the "free" immigration of the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. The Center will draw as well upon faculty members across campus whose expertise illuminates the study of immigration though an interdisciplinary dialogue. Moreover, it will advance its academic visibility and course availability by inviting a visiting scholar in immigration studies to the University each year to teach both undergraduate and graduate students (perhaps one course each semester) and offer him or her suitable time and research support to advance his or her own scholarship.

Fellowships will also extend to graduate students. During the next three years, the Center will create three four-year fellowships to draw new graduate students to the University. These fellowships will fund a graduate assistant who will offer administrative support to The Center and teaching assistants who can staff the new undergraduate courses on immigration. In this way, Center resources will be able to provide for most of the Center's staffing needs, efficiently extend undergraduate course offerings without draining resources from other History Department commitments, and attract top-notch future scholars who will be able to use their assistantships to gain valuable experience teaching various courses on the history of immigration. The Center will also provide several small travel grants to aid the research of these scholars-in- training. In all, this financial assistance will ensure that the history of immigration will remain a vibrant field well into the future.

The Center's third major goal is to serve as a source of outreach and community service to the University's surrounding communities. If immigration must be studied from a global historical perspective, it is lived from the ground up. The new global America can be found at the very doorstep of the University of Maryland. Prince Georges County, the county in which the University of Maryland is located, the nation's story appears in microcosm. Long described as a "red-neck county" and then the site of the largest black middle class in the United States, recently Prince Georges County has felt the full impact of the changing patterns of immigration. The proportion of the county's population that was foreign born grew from roughly 13 to 19 percent between 2000 and 2005, as the numbers of immigrants doubled in five years to 200,000. These new arrivals from, in order of magnitude, El Salvador, Nigeria, the Philippines, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Trinidad and Tobago, transformed the county's economy and society as well as its demography. By decade's end, one in four workers in Prince Georges County was an immigrant. Likewise, Latino enrollment in Prince Georges County's public schools stood above 15 percent and over one hundred and fifty mother tongues were spoken in the county's public school system.

This immigrant population can provide a source of support and study and, simultaneously, an important constituency and perhaps a source of material support. The Center will bring its scholars and students into active engagement and dialogue with these communities and with their associations, advocacy groups, and media workers, as well as with individual members of the wide variety of ethnic groups in the region. It will likewise engage with high school students and teachers throughout the metropolitan area. Further, it will provide seed grants to interdisciplinary projects that will bring the University and local populations together.

Discussions with interested parties confirm that the Center's research and education interests are attractive to many within the academy, the nation, the state, and the many immigrant communities of the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area. The Center will raise grant funds through partnerships with federal agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Maryland Humanities Council, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the Department of Education. It will also build on existing History Department partnerships with public schools and the University's Education School to pursue foundation funding to improve education about and within the region's immigrant communities. Moreover, the University's leadership in immigration history could eventually lead to significant private donations. While fundraising is by nature a long-term process of building trust, often measured in generations, the Center's focus on immigration history addresses a large but underserved constituency within the university, state, region, and nation. As such, it strikes a chord central to America's identity as a nation of immigrants.

1 February 2011

Staff

	Ira Berlin (iberlin@umd.edu) is Distinguished University Professor and Professor of History. In his most recent book, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (Viking-Penguin, 2010), he has expanded his interest in the transatlantic slave trade to consider how the African American experience between the fifteenth and the twenty-first centuries could be understood in terms as series of massive migrations. He is founding co-director of the Center for the History of the New America.

	Julie Greene (jmg@umd.edu) is a Professor of History with particular interest in the history of labor, the working-class, and immigration. Her most recent book, The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (Penguin Press, 2009), focuses on the tens of thousands of workingmen and workingwomen who traveled from all around the world to live and labor on the canal project. She is founding co-director of the Center for the History of the New America.

	Katarina Keane (kkeane@umd.edu ) is the Executive Director of the Center and an instructor in the Department of History. Her dissertation explored the experiences and contributions of Southern women in the American feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Her teaching and research interests center on social movements in the post-1945 period.

Leadership Council

	Aldo Bello formed Mind & Media, Inc., a full-service communication and media agency based in Washington, D.C., with Dr. Marilyn Finnemore in 1994. They envisioned a place where they could offer clients excellent communication products and services that make a measurable change in organizations, communities, and our world-products that inspire action. In 2012, Bello received the "Humanitarian Award" from the Americans for Immigrant Justice. He was awarded the Grand Jury Prize, Best Documentary for "What Happened" from the NY International Independent Film & Video Festival; Best Director, Documentary for "What Happened" from the NY International Independent Film & Video Festival; and Best Documentary for "What Happened" from the Long Island International Film Expo. He earned his Master's degree in Radio, Television, and Film from the University of Maryland in 1994.

	Neil Horikoshi serves as president and executive director of the Asian and Pacific of Islander American Scholarship Fund (APIASF). Prior to joining the APIASF, Mr. Horikoshi had a 30-year career with IBM, serving in a variety of local and executive management roles. He serves as chairman of the board of the Aplastic Anemia & MDS International Foundation, is an advisory council member for both the Asian American Justice Center and the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies and is a Board of Governors member for the "Go for Broke" National Education Center. He has been Member of Washington D.C. Advisory Board of BB & T Corp. since March 2011. He earned his bachelors degree in business administration from the University of Hawaii and a juris doctorate and master's degree in business administration from the University of Southern California.

	Michael C. Lin has held many leadership roles within the Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA), including serving as the National Executive Director (2007-08), as the first Chair of the Building Campaign (2003-04) and four years as the National President (1995-98). He is currently the OCA's representative on the Steering Committee of the 1882 Project, initiated last year by the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, National Council of Chinese Americans, and OCA. The 1882 Project is a national initiative to educate Americans about the history and lessons of the historic Chinese Exclusion policy, first enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1882 specifically to bar Chinese and, subsequently, other Asians from immigrating to this country. After more than 30 years of service, Michael recently retired from the National Institutes of Health where his work contributed to a Nobel Prize. He is currently a member of Maryland Council for New Americans, the Chair of the Board of Trustees of Montgomery College in Maryland and a member of the "Committee of 100." Michael emigrated from Taiwan, China to the U.S. more than 40 years ago. He obtained his doctorate degree in Georgia.

	Jose Antonio Tijerino is the President and CEO of the Hispanic Heritage Awards Foundation. Mr. Tijerino oversees the operation of the national, nonprofit organization. Prior to this, he was the director of public relations in the communications department for the Fannie Mae Foundation. Before that, he served as a manager for corporate communications for Nike, Inc.'s marketing department and served as a spokesperson. Before joining Nike, Mr. Tijerino developed and managed public relations and public affairs campaigns as an account supervisor for Burson-Marsteller and Cohn & Wolf public relations firms in Washington. He is extremely active in the District of Columbia community by serving on several boards and as communications counsel to numerous nonprofits. In addition, he serves on D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams's Commission on Latino Affairs. Mr. Tijerino earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Maryland where he graduated from the school of journalism and minored in psychology.

Advisory Board


	Judith Freidenberg (jfreiden@anth.umd.edu) is an Associate Professor of Anthropology who is currently researching health care and employment needs of Latin American immigrant retirees in Langley Park, Maryland. She coordinates the Network for Latino Research to foster research on social issues affecting local immigrant populations from Latin America. She is currently the Program Director for a new project at the University of Maryland investigating the anthropology of immigrant life. This program proposes to build links between the research and the policy communities to contribute to our knowledge of the New Americans.

	David Freund (dmfreund@umd.edu) is an Associate Professor of History who specializes in 20th-century U.S. history, with a research focus on the American metropolis, racial politics, and the impacts of public policy on economic opportunity and popular ideology. His current projects include a book-length history of the federal state's impact on financial markets, economic growth, and free market ideology since the Great Depression.

	Gary Gerstle (gary.gerstle@vanderbilt.edu) James G. Stahlman Professor of American History and Political Science at Vanderbilt University, is the author, co-author, and co-editor of six books and the author of more than thirty articles on twentieth-century American history. His particular interests include: immigration, race, and nationality; the significance of class in social and political life; and social movements, popular politics, and the state. His first book, Working-Class Americanism (Cambridge, 1989), explores issues of class, ethnicity, and Americanization among workers and their unions during the Great Depression. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001), winner of the 2001 Saloutos Prize for the outstanding work in immigration and ethnic history, examines how the modern American nation was shaped by the robust, protean, and contradictory traditions of civic and racial nationalism. He is also co-editor of E Pluribus Unum? Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation (2001). His many articles include "Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans" (Journal of American History, 1997), which has been anthologized in The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience and republished in Spanish in Desarrollo Economico, an Argentine journal.

	Perla Guerrero (guerrero@umd.edu) is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies and the first core faculty member in the U.S. Latina/o Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California in 2010. Her research and teaching interests lie comparative race and ethnicity, immigration, space and place, labor, and 20th century U.S. history. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her work is informed by historical methods and human geography as they pertain to Latina/o Studies, American Studies, and the U.S. South. Last year Dr. Guerrero was a Latino Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellow as well as Goldman Sachs Junior Fellow at the National Museum of American History.

	Jennifer Guiliano (guiliano@umd.edu) is an Assistant Director at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland and a Center Affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Her doctoral work explores the intersection of critical sport history, race and ethnicity, and the early twentieth century through the lens of collegiate sport mascots and halftime traditions. She is currently revising her dissertation, "An American Spectacle: College Mascots and the Performance of Tradition," which traces the appropriation, production, dissemination, and legalization of Native American images as sports mascots in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

	Sharon Harley (sharley@umd.edu), Associate Professor and chair of the African American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, researches and teaches black women's labor history and racial and gender politics. She is the editor and a contributor to the noted anthologies Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (Rutgers, 2002) and Women's Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices (Rutgers, 2008). She has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and, in the spring of 2008, at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, where she worked on her historical monograph about gender, labor, and citizenship in the lives of African Americans in the United States from the 1860s to 1920s.

	Dan Katz (dkatz@nlc.edu) is the Dean of Labor Studies at the National Labor College, and author of the recently published All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism. He is also co-editor, with Richard Greenwald, of Labor Rising: The Past and Future of Working People in America.

	Seung-kyung Kim (skim2@umd.edu) is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and an affiliate faculty of Department of Anthropology, Department of American Studies, and Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland. She served as a founding Director of the Asian American Studies Program from 2000-2004. Her research expertise includes Women and Work, Gender and Labor Politics, Gender and Development, Ethnography, Feminist Theory, and women in East Asia and Asian America. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Korea during 2004-5. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Global Citizens in the Making?: Transnational Migration and Education in Kirogi Families, which wasfunded by the Social Science Research Council.

	Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz (korzen@umd.edu) is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. He is a comparative and historical sociologist. In one line of research, Professor Korzeniewicz studies different dimensions of global inequality (e.g., between countries, within countries, and between men and women). A second line of research focuses on social movements, particularly in Latin America. Using a World-Systems approach, his recent work has examined the interaction between globalization, inequality and structural adjustment policies, as well as patterns of response and participation by civil society to free trade agreements in the Americas. His latest book is Unveiling Inequality: A World-Historical Perspective.

	Alan M. Kraut (akraut@american.edu) is a Professor of History at American University in Washington, D.C. He is a specialist in U.S. immigration and ethnic history, the history of medicine in the United States, and nineteenth century U.S. social history. He is the author or editor of seven books and over a hundred articles and book reviews. Dr. Kraut is the recent past president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the largest organization of immigration scholars in the country. He also sits on the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society. He serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of American Ethnic History and The Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies.

	Esther Kim Lee (eklee@umd.edu) is an Associate Professor of Theatre Scholarship and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her Ph.D. in Theatre History, Literature, and Criticism from Ohio State University, Columbus. Her edited anthology, Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas, was published by Duke University Press in September 2012. The collection features seven plays written by playwrights from the U.S., Canada, and Chile. She is the incoming Editor of Theatre Survey, and the special issue of the journal on Asia and Theatre Historiography (January 2013) is her first edited issue. She has been commissioned to write a book on the Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang, and she is also working on an edited collection of essays on Asian American performance.

	Peter Mallios (mallios@umd.edu) is an Associate Professor of English and founding director of the Foreign Literatures in America project at the University of Maryland. His research and teaching focus on 19th and 20th century U.S. literature, history, law, and politics, and global developments in the modern and modernist novel. He is the author of Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity (Stanford UP, 2010) and is currently working on two book projects: a history of foreign authored literature in the U.S., and a study of the constitutional effects of the Woodrow Wilson administration on modern American literature.

	Joe McCartin (jam6@georgetown.edu) is an Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. He is an expert on 20th century U.S. labor, social, and political issues. He teaches courses in 20th Century U.S. Labor History, U.S. Since 1945, America Between the Wars, 20th Century (and Modern) U.S. State and Society, and 20th Century U.S. Social History.

	Heather Nathans (hnathans@umd.edu) is a Professor and the Associate Director of Theatre in the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performing Arts at the University of Maryland. She specializes in American Theatre and Drama, African American Theatre, Jewish American Theatre, Musical Theatre, 17th and 18th century French Theatre, Theatre Historiography, English Restoration Drama, and Directing. Her publications include Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson (Cambridge University Press 2003) and Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1781-1861 (Cambridge University Press 2009); Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance (co-editor and contributing author, Delaware University Press 2011); Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (contributing author, Palgrave 2009); and Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions (contributing author, University of Michigan Press, 2010); Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press).

	Julie Park (juliepark@socy.umd.edu) is an assistant professor of Sociology and the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland. She is also a faculty associate of the Maryland Population Research Center (MPRC). Prior to joining the Maryland faculty in 2008, she was a research assistant professor in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development and the associate director of the Population Dynamics Research Group at the University of Southern California. Professor Park's research focuses most broadly on the adaptation process of immigrants in the United States which includes the areas of immigration, demography, race, and urban studies. Specifically, she examines how immigrants improve their socioeconomic status with longer duration in the U.S. by utilizing an innovative cohort method to assess the intergenerational mobility across immigrant generations. She also considers how residential segregation changes in new and established immigrant gateways.

	Michael Rendall (mrendall@umd.edu) joined the University of Maryland in the fall of 2011, moving from the non-profit RAND Corporation where he was Senior Social Scientist, Director of the Population Research Center and Postdoctoral Program in Population Studies, and Associate Director of the Labor and Population Division. His methodological work has included evaluation of data quality in fertility, family structure, and international migration; elderly poverty measurement; new statistical methods for combining survey and population data; and new methods for the simulation of cohort lifetimes and population dynamics. His theoretical work has included exploration of relationships of socio-economic inequality and social policy to fertility, household structure, and migration. His current research topics include migration between Mexico and the United States over the 1990s and 2000s, migration and social-demographic outcomes of New Orleanians following Hurricane Katrina, and modeling the development of obesity across U.S. childhoods.

	Ana Patricia Rodríguez (aprodrig@umd.edu) is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and U.S. Latina/o Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she teaches courses in Latin American, Central American, and U.S. Latina/o literatures and cultures. She received her Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include Central American and U.S. Latina/o literatures and cultures; Central American cultural production in the U.S.; transnational migration and cultural production; diaspora studies; violence and postwar/trauma studies; and community-based research. Professor Rodríguez has published articles on the cultural production of Latinas/os in the United States and Central Americans in the isthmus and the wider Central American diaspora. Her book, Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures (University of Texas Press, 2009), examines narratives of economic, symbolic, and human excess in Central American isthmian and diasporic texts. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled "Same Story, Different Endings": Trauma and Cultural Memory in the Salvadoran Diaspora, which explores the construction of post-traumatic memory of Salvadorans in the United States through representations in film, music, performance art, and testimonial texts.

	Paul Shackel (pshackel@umd.edu) is a Professor of Anthropology and the Founding Director of the Center for Heritage Resource Studies at the University of Maryland. Prior to establishing the Center for Heritage Resource Studies, he joined the Department of Anthropology in 1996 after working for the National Park Service for 7 1/2 years. Shackel is interested in the ways material items are used by individuals and groups in order to create social relations and group identity. Material culture and landscapes are powerful tools that can express gender, ethnicity, class, and power relations. Taking an anthropological and historical perspective of material culture allows him to pursue questions on how the value and meaning of goods may change over time in order to define and redefine individual and group relations.

	David B. Sicilia (dsicilia@umd.edu) is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Henry Kaufman Fellow in Business History in the Robert H. Smith School of Business. His research and teaching focus on the evolution of global and U.S. capitalism, including the role of immigrant entrepreneurs. He is co-author or co-editor of seven books and numerous articles on business and economic history, and a frequent commentator on national and international media outlets.

	Nancy Struna (nlstruna@umd.edu) is a Professor and Chair in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland. She also has affiliate faculty appointments in the department of Women's Studies, African American Studies, and History; the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Program; and the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity. She began her academic career as a social historian of sport, leisure, and work, published widely (including the book, People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America), and earned an international reputation. Like many scholars in American Studies, she has since shifted her questions, and her current work and interests fit neatly within both of the Department's intellectual themes. With a strong theoretical bent, she focuses on cultural production, the body and sexuality, agency and power in everyday life, citizenship, and constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in both early and contemporary Americans' experiences. She is currently working on a book entitled Transforming the Ordinary: Taverns and the Construction of Citizenship in Baltimore, Maryland, 1750-1820, which explores the material realities and ideological formations, including citizenship, that ordinary people in the course and relations of everyday life experienced and negotiated in the most ordinary of early American institutions, taverns.

	Stephen B. Thomas (sbt@umd.edu) is a Professor of Health Services Administration in the School of Public Health and Director of the University of Maryland Center for Health Equity at the University of Maryland. One of the nation's leading scholars in the effort to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities, Dr. Thomas has applied his expertise to address a variety of conditions from which minorities generally face far poorer outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and HIV/AIDS. He is principal investigator of the Research Center of Excellence on Minority Health Disparities, funded by the NIH-National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. He is also principal investigator, with Dr. Sandra Quinn, of the NIH National Bioethics Infrastructure Initiative: Building Trust Between Minorities and Researchers awarded in 2009.

	Daryle Williams (daryle@umd.edu) is an Associate Professor of History and the author of the Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945 (Duke University Press, 2001), 2001 winner of the American Historical Association's John Edwin Fagg prize. He has also authored several articles and book chapters on twentieth-century Brazilian cultural history. Recent research has examined the cultural politics of World Heritage in the Southern Cone and humanities computing. His current research examines blackness, the fine arts, and Brazilian slave society.

	Janelle Wong (janellew@umd.edu) is a Professor of American Studies and the Director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. Prior to joining the faculty at the University Maryland in 2012, she was at the University of Southern California in the Departments of Political Science and American Studies and Ethnicity. She also served as Executive Director of the Institute of Public Service at Seattle University (2011-12). Wong is author of Democracy's Promise: Immigrants and American Civic Institutions (2006, University of Michigan Press) and co-author of two books on Asian American politics. The most recent is Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and their Political Identities (2011, Russell Sage Foundation), based on the first nationally representative survey of Asian American' political attitudes and behavior. This groundbreaking study of Asian Americans was conducted in eight different languages with six different Asian national origin groups. Wong has received research funding from the Russell Sage Foundation, Irvine Foundation, and Carnegie Foundation. She was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, in 2006-2007.

	Madeline Zilfi (mzilfi@umd.edu) specializes in Middle Eastern and Islamic history during the last centuries of the Ottoman Empire, including the transition to the modern states of the Middle East. Her written research focuses on the period from the 1680s to the 1830s, particularly with regard to urban culture and social and religious movements, law and legal practice, slavery and freedom, and women's experience. Her most recent book, Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire, is a study of slavery, gender, and imperial ideology in the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.