The Immigration History Research Center Archives (IHRCA) has announced its 2018-2019 Grant-in-Aid awardees. This award program supports travel by researchers to the IHRCA to advance the awardees’ research. Awards are available through co-sponsorship from the Immigration History Research Center and the IHRCA through the ethnic and general funds.

The awardees this year are:

Anna Cichopek-Gajraj

Anna Cichopek-Gajraj’s project, In Transit: Postwar Journeys of Catholic and Jewish Refugees from Poland (1940s-1950s), delves into the journeys westward of Catholic and Jewish Poles that found themselves outside of their home country after World War II. Her project will focus on the temporariness and permanence of their lives “in transit.” It will also explore the refugees’ connections to Poland once residing in the US, and how their home identities fit into their new lives. Her project attempts to show how both groups followed almost identical routes westward, albeit did so separately. Cichopek-Gajraj is an Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University.

Selena Daly

Selena Daly’s project, The Italian Emigrant Soldier and the First World War, 1914–1930, examines the experiences of 300,000 Italian emigrant reservists, one third of which were emigrants to the US who were mobilized in support of the Italian war effort in the First World War. The transnational and comparative research focuses on exploring narratives of citizenship, loyalty and belonging among this group of men. Daly is a Lecturer in Modern European History at the Royal Holloway, University of London in England.

Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann

Anna Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann’s project, The Responses of American Ethnic Groups to Urban Renewal and Highway Construction Projects, 1949-1974, argues that the physical destruction of Polish and Italian American ethnic neighborhoods significantly contributed to those groups’ embrace of the Ethnic Revival, which provided them with a new sense of identity and belonging. The project will focus on exploring these attitudes and responses, and the social costs of this urban renewal on urban communities and working class neighborhoods. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann is a Distinguished Professor of History and CSU Professor at Eastern Connecticut State University.

Aurora Moxon

Aurora Moxon’s project, Italy’s Other: A Study of Transnational Calabrian Identity, analyzes how representations of Calabrian identity from the outside have shaped the self-perception and self-representation of both Calabrians in Italy and the Calabrian diaspora. She aims to explore transnational Calabrian identity — what it has meant to be Calabrian both within and outside Italy — and especially how and where marginalization has become transnationalized with the diaspora. Moxon is a History Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bristol in England.