In the winter of 476 A.D. the Ostrogoths, hungry and exhausted from wandering for months along the barren confines of the Byzantine Empire, wrote to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople requesting permission to enter the walled city of Epidaurum and just kinda crash and charge their phones. Closer to home, Orpheus walks Eurydice through a suburban…[Read more]

This graduate reading seminar examines some of the historical literature on migration in a global perspective, focusing on the nineteenth century through the present. It focuses on theoretical approaches to the study of migration as well as on case studies, moving between longue-durée and comparative issues on the one hand and local effects of…[Read more]

In the contemporary discourse on migration, it feels peculiarly seamless to discuss “bans and border walls” in a single breath. However, the global preoccupation with travel restriction and border security must not be taken as an inevitability. States arrive at bans and walls as preferred means of migration control as a result of making spe…[Read more]

Between 1880 and 1924, an estimated half million Arab migrants left the Ottoman Empire to live and work in the Americas. Responding to new economic forces linking the Mediterranean and Atlantic capitalist economies to one another, Arab migrants entered the manufacturing industries of the settler societies they inhabited, including industrial…[Read more]