The Immigration History Research Center Archives (IHRCA) at the University Libraries announces its 2025 Grant-in-Aid awardees, along with the Immigration History Research Center’s (IHRC) Michael G. Karni Scholarship awardee. 

The award programs support travel for researchers, so that they may visit the collections in the IHRCA and advance their research. Awards are available through co-sponsorship from the IHRC.

Congratulations to all! Please watch for future blog posts by these scholars, or announcements about Research-in-Progress talks.

2025 Grant-in-Aid Awardees

Jian Gao is Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Arizona State University. Gao’s project, “From Race to Birth: Refashioning Chinese Exclusion in America,” analyses the transformation of US immigration laws in the second half of the 20th century, and studies the transition from overt racial classifications to more subtle, birthplace-based systems.

Shuma Iwai is Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, whose research focuses on the activism of white Americans who supported the civil rights of Japanese Americans in the incarceration camps. This work fills a gap in the broader studies and considers activists, protestors, and advocates for the civil rights of Japanese Americans. 

Osamamen Oba Eduviere is a doctoral candidate at the University of Iowa. Oba Eduviere is conducting a community-based project exploring different trends of migration of African immigrants into the Midwest, and particularly at food stores as places of building community and creating identity, asking how food restaurateurs have enhanced cultural identities both presently and historically.

Sofiia Rzhevuska is a doctoral student at the University of Agder (Norway). Her project, “Making Heritage Abroad – Ukrainian Diaspora in the USA During the Cold War,” researches Ukrainian identity building within the displaced persons camps after World War II, and later during settlement in the United States, asking a central research question: how was Ukrainian identity and heritage developed and maintained in the post-World War II era in the American context?

2025 Karni Scholar

Dr. Christopher Campbell (Scotland) is a Scholar and Council Member at the Keston Institute, with a particular focus on the intersection of nationalism, religion, human rights, and foreign policy. His project explores the lobbying efforts of Baltic and Ukrainian emigre groups in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, as they attempted to influence US government policy towards the Soviet Union in support of their compatriots behind the Iron Curtain.