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Following negotiations between former IHRC Head of Research Collections/Associate Director Joel Wurl and Janusz Krzyzanowski, President of the Polish American Immigration and Relief Committee (PAIRC) in 2005-2006, the Immigration History Research Center has recently received ca. 100 linear feet of archival records of the PAIRC. The collection spans the years 1946-2001.
The College of Liberal Arts (UM) has made diversification and internationalization top priorities. Diversification and internationalization will be achieved through interdisciplinary collaborations of faculty, students and community. Global REM is designed to strengthen an existing cluster of interdisciplinary research centers, departments, programs and faculty that have made substantial contributions to the diversification of research and teaching. U.S.-focused in its earlier iterations, this cluster is now poised to undertake a new initiative by internationalizing its focus.
REM at Minnesota
CLA has long nurtured scholarly expertise and teaching excellence on race, ethnicity, and migration (REM). The U of M was the birthplace of immigration history in the 1920s, and it was an early innovator in interdisciplinary graduate and undergraduate education through its American Studies Program. The Immigrant Archives and Center for Immigration Studies (later joined as the Immigration History Research Center, IHRC) again put Minnesota on the scholarly map in the 1970s.
A formal REM initiative resulted from funding from the Graduate School between 1999 and 2001. REM distinguished itself by linking the study of ethnic “whiteness” and racialized minorities. A REM-inspired cluster of Americanist faculty has sustained itself through institutional linkages among CLA centers, departments, and programs (African and African-American Studies, American Studies, American Indian Studies, Asian-American Studies Chicano Studies, GWSS, IHRC, etc.) As a result of recent hires, conversations in the Institute for Advanced Study around the Politics of Population symposium and collaborative, and the institutionalization of programs in the Institute for Global Studies, REM is now positioned to become an equally innovative initiative we will call “Global REM.”
Continue reading the outline for this initiative.
Thanks to the generosity of donors during the recent Endowment Campaign, the IHRC now offers small grants of $250 to support travel costs of researchers needing to consult its ethnic studies collections for a minimum one-week period. Grants are open to graduate students, faculty and independent scholars in the U.S. or internationally who live more than a day's drive from the Twin Cities.
For fiscal year 2007-2008, grants can be awarded to researchers intending to use the Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Italian or Latvian collections. Grants may be used to travel to the IHRC at any time between July 1, 2007 and June 30, 2008. For further details.
Susan Grigg died May 5 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester where she was being treated for cancer. Susan received her Ph.D. in American history and archives administration from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her M.L.S. from Simmons College. Before coming to Minnesota, she worked at Yale; she left here to head the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, worked at Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth, MA, and then served for ten years as head of the Alaska and Polar Regions Collections at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. She is survived by her husband, the Rev. Jace Kahn.