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Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute (TASI)
Immigrants in Europe and North America: Representations of Self and Other
Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute in European Studies—Graduate Student Fellowship Program
June 9 - June 21, 2008 in Minneapolis
Application deadline: April 21, 2008
Presented by the Center for German & European Studies at the University of Minnesota, which is funded by the University of Minnesota and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Additional funding for the 2008 Institute is provided by the DAAD via a StADaF grant, the trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), and Pfizer Deutschland GmbH. We thank all sponsors for their generous support.
Working Schedule & Documents
Program content is available for registered participants in the Summer Institute. If you are a registered participant and need to access this page, please e-mail Anna Burger.
Overview
The Trans-Atlantic Summer Institutes provide a unique forum for graduate-level students from North America, Germany, and other European countries to explore together advanced topics relating to Germany's and Europe's history, politics, and society. Each summer, twelve European and twelve North American graduate-level students work intensively for two to three weeks and explore in depth questions that will enrich their dissertations in German and European Studies. The Summer Institutes are co-taught by a team of faculty and aim to make a major contribution to the training of the next generation of experts on Germany and Europe. They introduce European students to the American university; North American students will acquire a similar familiarity with the European setting. They foster the international discussions and collaborations that are fundamental to the scholarly enterprise. As a student in the Summer Institute, you will learn how to combine the best aspects of training in both settings—the close attention to archival sources and their interpretation in Europe with the broad trans-disciplinary readings that characterize North American scholarship.
TASI is a non-credit seminar for graduate-level students in all fields; the 2008 Institute will convene in Minneapolis.
2008 TASI fellows will also experience US academic conference culture and attend parts of the 14th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women and an interdisciplinary symposium on "Gender Ratios and Global Migrations," which run concurrently with TASI on the campus of the University of Minnesota.
Topic
"Immigrants in Europe and North America: Representations of Self and Other" is the topic of the Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute 2008. For the past half century the immigration of culturally and ethnically different groups has been transforming economies, societies and polities on both sides of the Atlantic. For example, Germany has experienced a transition from an ethnically homogenous to a multi-ethnic society, and the cultural diversity of the United States has dramatically increased. In the wake of these transformations, questions of immigration, ethnic and race relations, and the politics of citizenship and multiculturalism have come to the fore in public life, in particular since 9/11. A huge and diverse body of data continues to accumulate: population data, newspaper articles, images, case records, fiction, personal narratives, art, and even music. Foreigners and migrants struggle to identify spaces and media to represent themselves in their own words and images. Add the very terminology of scholarly analysis, terms such as "migrants," "immigrants," "emigrants," "refugees," and the issue of representation becomes central to every facet of this growing archive.
In TASI 2008, we will focus on representation in the broad sense and examine from multiple disciplinary perspectives how immigrants are represented and represent themselves in different EU countries and the United States. How do conflicts between self and other figure in the creation of scholarly sources and scholarly work itself? How does a focus on representation reshape our understanding of multiculturalism and the future of multicultural coexistence in Western democracies?
Faculty
Donna Gabaccia is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, where she holds the Rudolph Vecoli Chair in Immigration History Research. She is also the Director of the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Immigration and American Diversity (Blackwell Publishers, 2002) and Italy's Many Diasporas (University College of London Press and University of Washington Press, 2000). She has edited or co-edited many books, including, with Vicki L. Ruiz American Dreaming, Global Realities: Rethinking U.S. Immigration History (University of Illinois Press, 2006), with Colin Leach Immigrant Lives in the U.S.: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives (Routledge, 2004), and with Franca Iacovetta Women, Gender and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (University of Toronto Press, 2002). She currently serves as President of the Social Science History Association.
Barbara Wolbert is Adjunct Professor of Comparative Cultural and Social Anthropology at Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. She is the author of Der getötete Paß. Arbeitsmigration und Rückkehr in die Türkei. Eine ethnologische Studie (Akademie Verlag, 1995). Other recent publications include a special journal issue of New German Critique on "Multicultural Germany: Art, Performance and Media," co-edited with Deniz Göktürk (2005); "The Visual Production of Locality. Turkish Family Pictures, Migration, and the Creation of Virtual Neighborhoods,"Visual Anthropology Review 17 (1): 21-35, 2001; and "De-Arranged Places: East German Art in the Museums of Unified Germany," The Anthropology of East Europe Review 19, 1: 57-64, 2001.
Fellowship Information & Application Materials
The Institute is intended for graduate-level students working toward a Ph.D. or other terminal degree. The language of instruction is English. Competency in English and one other European language is required. Preference will be given to students who have already defined a dissertation topic.
Pending final budget approval, all fellows will receive a fellowship to cover most expenses:
- Housing and meal allowance for the duration of the Institute
- Access to library and archival materials and Internet resources
- Registration fees for Berkshire Conference
Fellowships for North American graduate students will also provide up to $350 in support of round-trip airfare to Minneapolis from within North America.
Complete applications for admission to the Institute must be received by April 21, 2008. Applications may be submitted electronically to cges@umn.edu. If you choose this option, please put "2008 TASI Application" in subject line. Decisions will be made by May 1, 2008.
A complete application consists of 1) a letter of interest, 2) a two-page dissertation abstract, or a two-page statement about the relevance of this topic to the applicant's research, 3) a curriculum vitae, 4) an official graduate transcript, and 5) one letter of recommendation. The letter of interest should include information on the applicant's scholarly background, interests, and career goals. The statement should address how the Institute topic fits into the applicant's program of study, and what the applicant hopes to gain through participation in the Institute. Please send applications to:
Professors Donna Gabaccia and Barbara Wolbert
Center for German & European Studies
University of Minnesota
214 Social Science Building
267— 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455