In the eyes of history professor Ira Berlin, immigration is anything but a chapter in a dusty textbook — he’s working to bring the issue to life at the university.
Partnered with fellow history professor Julie Greene, Berlin launched the university’s Center for the History of the New America last month. The center, he said, will bring together a worldwide community of students, experts and lawmakers to study the international history of immigration while acting as a focal point for outreach to local immigrant communities in the area.
Berlin noted that while several other colleges and universities in the nation feature centers for the study of contemporary immigration, the focus on immigration’s history has been largely overlooked in the world of academia. This university’s program, the creators said, will bring this perspective to the forefront.
“This is such a fascinating moment of American history that we’re living through,” Greene said. “As historians, we were really interested to be a part of that conversation happening in America about the relationship between America as a nation and the immigrants who are building and rebuilding America as we speak.”
And while the center has only just begun — it has yet to find a physical home on the campus or establish a permanent staff — Berlin and Greene said the project has already received support and seed grants from the provost’s office, the vice president for research and the dean of the arts and humanities college.
They added that they are starting to network with several university departments, including criminology and criminal justice, anthropology, Latin American studies and journalism.
Berlin said it is no surprise the topic of immigration has generated interest university-wide, noting that university President Wallace Loh is an immigrant and many students and faculty, especially in the history department, are foreign-born or have immigrant roots.
“One of the nice things about this project is that we feel like we’re pushing on an open door, that when we tell people about it, they kind of say, ‘Ah-hah!’ and they like the idea,” Berlin said. “It’s been very rewarding in the sense that a lot of people want to be a part of this project.”
The center is also forging relationships with federal agencies, including a collaboration with anthropology professor Judith Freidenberg in a large grant proposal to the Smithsonian Institution. The networking has even reached a global scale, as the center established a relationship with the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil, which is compiling an archive on the African diaspora.
Freidenberg, who heads the university’s Anthropology of the Immigrant Life Course Research Program, said the creation of this new center is fostering collaboration across disciplines to generate new knowledge about immigration.
“By bringing in the historical perspective, we can have the long view and also have the more contemporary view,” Freidenberg said. “By collaborating with trained historians, we can do more in getting information about this issue to the general public.”
And history graduate student Stephanie Reichelderfer, who has been involved in planning the center, said the initiative’s interdisciplinary nature will further enhance graduate student research.
“I think that too often graduate students who have a similar interest in the same subject, but are from different disciplines, do not have the chance to get together and discuss their ideas,” Reichelderfer wrote in an e-mail. “I believe that the Center will help to break down these walls and build a community focused on the topic of immigration and migration.”
Berlin, who released his fourth book on the African-American experience last month, said the study of immigration in American society must also embrace it on the community level. Prince George’s County has a large number of new immigrant communities, and Berlin said he hopes to collaborate with Freidenberg on a future project where students would go into these communities and gather oral histories of these new immigrants.
“Many of us come here and we leave and we see many of the signs in different languages as we drive off, but we don’t really connect with those communities,” Berlin said. “We want to make them feel welcome on this campus.”
Berlin said the center is working to create new courses, hire new faculty with immigration expertise and perhaps offer a certificate or minor in immigration studies.
History professor David Sicilia is planning the center’s first conference on immigrants and entrepreneurship for the spring or fall 2012.
Ultimately, the center’s leaders hope it will generate new understanding of the national discussion of immigration from a fresh perspective.
“We don’t think of ourselves as a Washington think tank or a political advocacy group,” Sicilia said. “This immigrant issue is very hot and very political and one where there’s been a kind of yelling back and forth, often without a lot of good information at hand, especially without a historical perspective and sometimes without much objectivity. We hope to be a calmer voice in this discussion and hope to bring to bear very good empirical research about this issue.”
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