Spring quarter honors seminar with study tour to New York City!

15HIST396H (Thursdays, 4:00-6:20pm)

Description updated 1/18/11

No phenomenon has helped to define our modern global era more than the migration of people across national borders.  And no nation-state has been more central to the realities and imaginations of the “immigrant experience” than the United States.

This multidisciplinary seminar explores the transnational and domestic dimensions of immigration, race, and citizenship in history from the seventeenth century through today, with an emphasis on the past century and a half.  Though focused primarily on the United States, this course is as globally oriented as the travels of the people we examine.  We will systematically interrogate the course themes from a diversity of academic disciplines and non-academic vocations.  These include history, law, political science, literature, sociology, journalism, cinema, and grass-roots activism. The course, then, has two intertwined goals:

1. to gain an empirical and theoretical understanding of immigration, race, and citizenship, and
2. to explore how knowledge is produced – and how we “consume” it -- through a variety of methodologies, both from within the academy and beyond it.  We will perpetually ask ourselves “what difference does one particular approach to our topic make versus another, and how might this apply even beyond our course themes?”

At the end of the quarter, we will travel to New York City, long a critically important global and national hub for the immigrant experience.  We will explore a range of lively phenomena central to our course themes, including different culinary cultures; public policy; the musical, dramatic, and visual arts; community mobilization; nongovernmental advocacy; religion; and the evolving landscapes of neighborhoods that successive waves of immigrants have shaped.

Study Tour Itinerary
Study Tour Dates – Sunday, June 12 – Friday, 17, 2011

Expected Site Visits and Tours in NYC include (subject to change):

• Tenement Museum and Ellis Island
• Guided neighborhood and architectural walking tours
• Immigrant advocacy organizations (both community agencies and international headquarters of large nongovernmental organizations)
• United Nations, with emphases on refugees and human rights
• Recently discovered African Burial Ground in Manhattan
• Religious institutions
• Music and theater performances
• Meals in such locations as (subject to change) a soul food restaurant in Harlem, Chinatown, Little Italy, the diverse immigrant neighborhood of Sunnyside, Queens, and an Ethiopian restaurant in the West Village.

Costs
Per student cost is expected to be $900-1000. Participating University Honors students who are in good standing will receive a $400 travel grant to offset costs, making the actual expected cost $500-600.

Final cost is contingent upon airfare and hotel accomodations. We are doing all we can to lessen the cost! Please check back for updates.

Other Information
Students are not required to apply to participate in this honors seminar and study tour. However, students must be in good standing in University Honors in order to receive the $400 honors travel grant.

Questions? Contact Dr. Steven Porter (portersp@ucmail.uc.edu) or Debbie Brawn (debbie.brawn@uc.edu).