Creating Radical Possibility in Academia
I’m a transnational historian working at the intersection of US immigration policy and Italian migration who is working to create space for radical possibility in academia. Take it from me: I carry a 4-4 teaching load and am the sole faculty member and program director for the history major at a small, resource-strapped liberal arts college. I used to teach a 5-5 load at a busy community college. I’m a mom of two. I didn’t start to publish more, mentor in more meaningful ways, and still take the weekends off because I “found the time.” I make the time by leading with my values. Creating radical possibility means changing the way we research, write, teach, and mentor to be more ourselves in academic spaces.
I invite you to join me to identify what we really value and use that to direct our time and attention, so we can all move more fully toward satisfaction, fulfillment, and meaningful connection in academia.
I hold four core values:
- Finding the joy in writing
- Mentoring that counts – mentoring for what matters
- Building community on campus, in class, and internationally
- Making space to bring our whole selves to our work as academics
I approach my work with the goal to build affirming, intentional, international communities that bring students and scholars together at diverse career stages.
My values of cultivating joy, community, and international connections motivate my research and writing.
I focus on the earliest years of national border controls as they emerged simultaneously in Italy and the US. I argue that Italy and Italian diplomatic archives (which captured the work and the worries of Italian diplomats and consuls stationed in the US) provide an essential perspective on the creation of US immigration policy. In other words, the connection between the two nations forged through migration is profoundly illuminating – and necessary – for US historians to understand.
The transnational lens that is essential to my work as a historian centers international archival research and foreign historiography within a rich field of US-based scholarship on migration policy, border controls, and migratory labor. I am adept at working in and weaving together foreign archives to fill holes in the US record and am an advocate in the profession for the importance of foreign language sources for US history.
Book Projects
My first book, Partners in Gatekeeping: How Italy Shaped the Enforcement of U.S. Immigration Law over Ten Pivotal Years, 1891-1901 (University of Georgia Press, 2023) ), uses previously unpublished Italian diplomatic sources to tell a distinctly transnational story of what I call “anticipatory ‘remote control.’” Italians’ experiences with exclusion at the border and their government’s response to American gatekeeping show how governments worked cooperatively and antagonistically to shape the movement of people across borders.
My second book, Managing Migration in Italian and US History (DeGruyter, 2024) an edited volume in collaboration with Maddalena Marinari and Daniele Fiorentino, shows how the development of gatekeeping in the United States and Italy laid the groundwork for immigration restriction worldwide. The book brings together European and American scholars, many for the first time, effectively crossing national and disciplinary boundaries. Using archives on both sides of the Atlantic, the essays, including a research chapter I co-authored, contribute to recent scholarship on the global repercussions of immigration restriction and the complex web of interactions created by limits on mobility.
My third book project, The Forgotten Solution to America’s Immigration Problem: Italians, Distribution Policy, and the South in the Progressive Era, unearths the roots of the “immigration problem” in an unlikely place: the American South. It will be the first book to take seriously what was known in the Progressive era as “distribution policy,” or the organized transfer of immigrants from crowded cities to rural farms as a solution to the period’s emerging “immigration problem.” This history complicates the race binary in Southern history, bringing in obscure US and previously unknown Italian sources that internationalize the discourse on the New South.
While other ethnic and national groups engaged with distribution policy or were the subject of policy proposals and small settlements in the Progressive Era, the largest group considered for colonization were Italians, the largest group of foreigners then arriving each year to the nation’s borders. At the same time that “hopelessly degraded” Italians came to represent the nation’s new “immigration problem,” the significance of the South as the site for this program and the influence the region had on national debates has never been the subject of a scholarly book. Distribution policy is a forgotten solution because it did not transform the region or the nation. Yet it deserves attention for the ways it forces us to look anew at race and regional economic development in the construction of a national, and persistent, “immigration problem.” The Journal of American Ethnic History introduces some of the book’s arguments in the winter 2023 issue.
I have also published in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, Perspectives on History, The American Historian, and World History Connected.
I maintain an active publication pipeline that engages archives, colleagues, issues, and audiences across borders. My current research projects represent an extension of my arguments about gatekeeping and the politics of restriction in the United States, and will offer the first significant revision in decades of important scholarship on migration to the South, peonage, the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885, and the role of labor agents with the perspective of new sources drawn from Italian records.
Awards and Grants
Most recently I have been the recipient of awards and fellowships including a Fulbright US Scholar Award to Italy, where I held the Research Lectureship in US History in the Department of Political Science at the University of Roma Tre, in 2020. In 2018 I won a John Hope Franklin Grant from the the American Philosophical Society, and in 2014 I was the inaugural Community College Humanities Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Teaching
These values translate into my teaching. I cultivate a critically reflective teaching practice and emphasize curricular design that pulls back the curtain on what we do as historians, authentically brings students into the practice of history in an empowering way from the very beginning, and values the introductory classroom as a fundamental and empowering experience for students. This reflects my commitment to accessible, high-quality humanities education first as a community college professor and now at a small liberal arts women’s college.