The history of immigration in the United States is one of bans, quotas, restrictions, and exclusions. Immigrants have negotiated inconsistent and discriminatory definitions of authorized and unauthorized belonging and targeted restrictions on citizenship since the nation’s founding. This symposium brings together scholars who will illuminate the historical experiences of Asian American, Latinx, African American, Muslim, Jewish, gendered, and sexualized immigrants from the late-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.

Libby Garland is Associate Professor of History at Kingsborough College, The City University of New York, where she teaches immigration history and urban history. She earned her PhD at the University of Michigan. Garland is the author of After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921-1965 (University of Chicago Press, 2014), winner of both the American Jewish Historical Society’s Saul Viener book prize and the American Historical Association’s Dorothy Rosenberg prize in 2015.

Kunal Parker is a professor and Dean's Distinguished Scholar with a PhD in history from Princeton University, a JD from Harvard Law School, and a BA from Harvard University. He recently completed Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America (Cambridge University Press, 2015). His first book, Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790-1900: Legal Thought Before Modernism, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. Professor Parker's teaching areas and interests include American legal history, estates and trusts, immigration and nationality law, and property.

Anna Pegler-Gordon became interested in US immigration policy when she was photographed for her immigration papers in 1990. Her first book, In Sight of Ellis Island: Photography and the Development of US Immigration Policy, began as a dissertation in the University of Michigan Department of American Culture. In Sight of America won the Immigration and Ethnic History Society Theodore Saloutos Book Award (2009) and an essay drawn from this research was included in Best American History Essays (2008). Pegler-Gordon is currently completing work on a second book project, tentatively titled From East to East: Asian Migration and the Hidden History of Ellis Island. Pegler-Gordon is an associate professor at Michigan State University, teaching in the James Madison College and the Asian Pacific American Studies program. She recently stepped down as director of MSU’s APA Studies program and has started as director of a graduate fellowship program focused on interdisciplinary inquiry and teaching.

Free and open to the public.

This LSA Bicentennial Theme Semester event is presented with support from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and the University of Michigan Bicentennial Office. Additional support provided by Afroamerican and African Studies; American Culture; Anthropology; Arab and Muslim American Studies; Asian, Pacific Islander American Studies; Bentley Historical Library; Comparative Literature; Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies; English Language and Literature; Frankel Center for Judaic Studies; History; Institute for the Humanities; Latino/a Studies; Latinx Studies Workshop; Office of Research; Rackham Graduate School Dean’s Office; Romance Languages and Literatures; and William L. Clements Library.