Past Events
Below you can see a selection of IHRC's 2024-2026 events.
On April 22, 2026 this webinar brought together scholars of diaspora and activism who examined how international, immigrant, and migrant students in the U.S. have organized against repression, especially in the context of global securitization with contested nation-state narratives. The Trump administration has increasingly targeted student dissenters with precarious legal status to test the limits of their power and manipulate public emotions, as evidenced by the detention of Tufts PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk after her F-1 visa was quietly and secretly revoked, and many other cases since early 2025.
In this climate, when political persecution escalates against social-justice-oriented knowledge production, how do we sustain critical socio-political learning and engagement? Focusing on the fraught position of students of diaspora–who may face repercussions from both the U.S. and their home states when they are too vocal–the webinar will examine how they enact change across campuses and communities. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples of diaspora activism, the speakers connected earlier movements to struggles today and explore lessons for study, struggle, and solidarity in the current moment.
Speakers:
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Wendy Cheng, University of Southern California
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Roderick A. Ferguson, Yale University
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Yana Gorokhovskaia, Freedom House
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Dana Moss, University of Notre Dame
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Yalile Suriel (moderator), University of Minnesota
This event was cosponsored by the Department of American Studies, the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, the Department of History, and the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender and Sexuality Studies (RIDGS).
On March 31, 2026 the IHRC and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS) hosted an online discussion about The Founding of the United States and Immigration History. 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. During this event, specialists in citizenship, borderlands, refugee policy, and the early American republic used the anniversary as an opportunity to critically assess the place of migration in the creation and early history of the United States.
Speakers:
- Amanda Frost, University of Virginia Law School
- Samantha Seeley, University of Richmond
- Evan Taparata, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
- Omar Valerio-Jiménez, University of Texas, San Antonio
- Hidetaka Hirota, University of California, Berkeley (Moderator)
Watch the recording of The Founding of the US and Immigration History
On March 4, 2026, the IHRC welcomed Dr. Khoi Nguyen, PhD to UMN.
What happens when U.S. war refugees, such as Southeast Asians, fail to meet the state’s expectations of becoming model citizens? Despite their legal resettlement process following the U.S. wars in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, Indigenous Southeast Asian refugees continue to be disproportionately targeted for deportation. “The Borders Crossed Us Too” explores the intersections of global Indigenous studies, relational race and ethnic studies, and critical refugee studies to examine the deportation of Indigenous ethnic minorities from Southeast Asia, focusing on the U.S. border regime and the prison-to-deportation pipeline. This work draws on conversations with Southeast Asian refugees in the Twin Cities and Philadelphia, acting as a counterpoint to the “good refugees” narrative. Nguyen asks how the experiences of migrants and refugees, especially those from global Indigenous communities, can deepen our understanding of militarized humanitarianism and the deportation regime, allowing us to imagine otherwise.
Khoi Nguyen (they/he) is a 2025-2026 Panda Express Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Their research focuses on the deportation of war refugees, particularly Indigenous ethnic minorities from Southeast Asia, within broader issues of mobility injustices that challenge US exceptionalism, inciting Indigenous possibilities. Nguyen earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
This event was co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program, the Approaching Global Asias Collaborative, and the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies (RIDGS).
On March 3, 2026 the IHRC welcomed Kelly Lytle Hernández to UMN.
During the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), Congress passed the nation’s first immigration ban, targeting free Black migrants, namely Haitians, for exclusion. After the Civil War, federal authorities wildly expanded the nation’s immigration system to target Black, Asian, and other nonwhite immigrants for exclusion, punishment, and removal, creating the framework for our modern immigration system. By the 1930s, Congress had adopted a Whites-only immigration regime in all but name. That regime effectively hung a “Whites only” sign on the nation’s front door while propping the nation’s “backdoor” open to a racialized, criminalized, and deportable workforce. To date, federal authorities have revised but never repealed this system. This talk chronicled the rise, evolution, and persistence of the whites-only immigration regime, from 1803 to now.
Kelly Lytle Hernández holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (Norton, 2022). She is also the founding director and principal advisor for the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which documents the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize Board.
This event was co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies (RIDGS).
The idea that the United States is a “nation of immigrants” erases Indigenous presence and the role of immigrants in settler colonialism. Indigenous nations have unique histories of citizenship and borders, and some Indigenous peoples have their own histories of migration, often provoked by displacement and dispossession. On this webinar, scholars explored the complex intersections of Indigenous and immigration histories.
Speakers:
Elizabeth Ellis (Peoria), Princeton University
Hana Maruyama, University of Connecticut
Fantasia Painter (Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community), University of California, Irvine
Jorge Ramirez-Lopez (Triqui), University of California, Santa Barbara
David Aiona Chang (Native Hawaiian), University of Minnesota (Moderator)
This webinar was co-sponsored by the Department of American Indian Studies.
Watch Intersections in Indigenous and Immigration Histories recording here.
On December 2, 2025 the Immigration History Research Center and the Katherine E. Nash Gallery hosted Professor Jorell Meléndez-Badillo who discussed his new book Puerto Rico: A National History, chronicling the history of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans from pre-Columbian times to the present. Meléndez-Badillo is associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He collaborated with Puerto Rican recording artist, Bad Bunny, to add visual lessons on Puerto Rican history to Bad Bunny’s 2025 album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos.”
This public lecture was the closing event for Katherine E. Nash Gallery’s Vaivén: 21st-Century Art of Puerto Rico and Its Diaspora, a multidisciplinary exhibition spanning twenty-five years of Puerto Rican artistic production from forty-three artists working in Puerto Rico and its U.S. diaspora. It was be followed by a reception at the Katherine E Nash Nash Gallery. This event was cosponsored by the Department of American Studies, the Department of Art, the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, the Department of History, and Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies (RIDGS).
European migrants are often depicted as the nation’s iconic legal immigrants, yet Europeans did enter and remain in the US without proper authorization. On November 12, the IHRC hosted a webinar in which our experts told the stories of European migrants who adopted irregular migration strategies to enter and remain in the US throughout the 20th century. They also discussed how the treatment of unauthorized European migrants differs from that of other unauthorized migrants, and how the reception of undocumented immigrants continues to be impacted by the dynamics of race, class, and gender. The speakers are contributors to Hidden Histories of Unauthorized Migrations from Europe to the United States, published by University of Illinois Press in 2025.
Speakers:
- Danielle Battisti, University of Nebraska, Omaha
- S. Deborah Kang, University of Virginia
- Torsten Feys, Flanders Marine Institute
- Carly Goodman, Rutgers University at Camden
- Llana Barber, Immigration History Research Center (moderator)
This webinar was cosponsored by the Department of History.
On November 5, 2025, the IHRC hosted our inaugural Philip K. Hitti Memorial Fund lecture featuring Charlotte Karem Albrecht, author of Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling, which was published open access with University of California Press in 2023. Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian women accessed more economic autonomy through their participation in peddling networks. In Possible Histories, Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a site for revealing how dominant ideas about sexuality are imbricated in Arab American racial histories. Karem Albrecht marshals a queer affective approach to community and family history to show how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their interdependent networks of labor and care appeared in interconnected discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race. Possible Histories conceptualizes this profession, and its place in narratives of Arab American history, as a "queer ecology" of laboring practices, intimacies, and knowledge production. This book ultimately proposes a new understanding of the long arm of Arab American history that puts sexuality and gender at the heart of ways of navigating US racial systems.
Charlotte Karem Albrecht is Associate Professor of American Culture and Women’s and Gender Studies and Director of the Arab and Muslim American Studies program at the University of Michigan. Dr. Karem Albrecht is a proud graduate of University of Minnesota's Feminist Studies doctoral program and remembers her time in the Twin Cities with great fondness.
Philip Khuri Hitti (1886-1978) was a Lebanese American scholar, college professor, and authority on the Near East who was instrumental in establishing the field of Near East Studies in the United States. A collection of his papers, including personal and professional correspondence, manuscripts, lectures, speeches, book reviews, personal memorabilia, photographs and a scrapbook, is held at the Immigration History Research Center Archives (IHRCA).
View the Philip K. Hitti Memorial Fund lecture: Possible Histories recording.
This event was co-sponsored by The Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, the Department of History, the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies (RIDGS), and the Immigration History Research Center Archives of the University of Minnesota Libraries.
Current initiatives to restrict birthright citizenship would have broad implications for many American communities. Why does the US have birthright citizenship? How have immigrants and other populations shaped US citizenship, and how would proposed changes affect different groups? Our panel of experts provided the historical context for today’s birthright citizenship debate. The History of the Present webinar series is designed to give historical context for a contemporary immigration issue, aimed at both an interdisciplinary scholarly audience and the general public.
Speakers:
Moderator: William Jones
This webinar was cosponsored by the Department of History.