Education:

MA, History, Boston College
BA, Foreign Studies, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan

Research Interests:

I study the history of American immigration. My major areas of research are nineteenth-century United States, immigration policy, poverty and welfare, and transatlantic migration.

My dissertation examines anti-Irish nativism and the deportation of immigrant paupers in nineteenth-century Massachusetts. It argues that anti-Irish nativism in Massachusetts was not simply a set of prejudiced ideas, but it had a significant practical impact on Irish immigrants in the form of state deportation policies that physically removed them from the country and helped lay the foundations for later federal immigration control. By examining the post-deportation experience of expelled paupers in Britain and Ireland, the dissertation places American nativism in a transnational context that reveals how deportation from the United States was part of a wider system of pauper restriction and forcible removal operating in the Atlantic world.

Fellowships and Grants

• Louis Pelzer Memorial Award, Organization of American Historians, 2012
• Summer Graduate Research Stipend, Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, Boston College, 2010
• Hibernian Research Award from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, 2010
• Adele Dalsimer Dissertation Fellowship, Irish Studies Program, Boston College, 2009-2010
• Summer Research Stipend, Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, Boston College, 2009
• George E. Pozzetta Dissertation Award, Immigration and Ethnic History Society, 2009
• Gilder Lehrman Fellowship, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2009
• John Higham Travel Grant, Organization of American Historians and Immigration and Ethnic History Society (co-sponsored), 2009
• The Littleton-Griswold Grant, American Historical Association, 2008
• Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2008-2009
• Research Expense Grant, Graduate Student Association, Boston College, 2008
• Research Expense Grant, Boston College, 2007
• University Fellowship, Boston College, 2005-2010
   

Publications:

• “The Moment of Transition: State Officials, the Federal Government, and the Formation of American Immigration Policy,” Journal of American History, forthcoming.
• “Wendell Phillips.” In The Encyclopedia of the Early Republic and Antebellum America, ed. Christopher Bates. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2010
• “Abraham Lincoln.” In Encyclopedia of Slavery in the Americas, ed. Edward E. Baptist. New York: Facts On File, forthcoming
• “Daughters of St. Crispin,” “Lynn (Massachusetts) Shoemakers’ Strike,” and “Pauline Agassiz Shaw.” In Women in American History: An Encyclopedia, ed. Hasia R. Diner. New York: Facts On File, forthcoming

Conference Presentations:

• “Gatekeeping Manhattan: Exclusion, Detention, and Assisted Return of Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century New York City,” Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, Baltimore, Maryland, October 20-23, 2011.
• “‘Questionable Immigration’: The British Assisted Emigration Scheme and American Border Control in the Gilded Age,” Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians with the National Council on Public History, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, April 19-22, 2012. “Asylums Rediscovered: Immigration Control at Almshouses in Antebellum Massachusetts, ” Annual Meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 14-17, 2011.
• “The Moment of Transition: Immigration Control by Northern States and the Struggle for National Immigration Legislation in Reconstruction Years,” Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Boston, Massachusetts, January 7, 2011.
• “The North American Irish: The Relocation of Irish Migrants from the United States to Canada in the Nineteenth Century,” The Association for Canadian Studies and the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association Joint Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada, November 6, 2010.
• “Across the Atlantic Once Again: Forced Migration of the Poor from the United States to Ireland and Britain,” Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, San Diego, California, January 10, 2010.
• “Pauper Extradition and Slave Rendition: The Double Standard of Civil Liberties in Antebellum Massachusetts,” Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, Washington, D.C., November 6, 2009.
• “An Intersection of Irish and Chinese Immigrant Experiences: American Immigration Policy, 1848-1892,” Fourth World Congress of the International American Studies Association, Beijing, China, September 19, 2009.
• “Forced Labor and Irish Involuntary Migration in the Shadow of American Slave Emancipation,” International Meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies, Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland, June 2009.
• “Resisting Cosmopolitanism: Another Look at Nineteenth-Century Boston as a Port City,” Nordic Association for American Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, May 2009.
• “Aliens, Deportation, and Citizenship before the Age of Federal Immigration Restriction,” Harvard Migration and Immigration Incorporation Workshop, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 7, 2009.
• “Countering Nativism: Irish Immigrants’ Fight with the Threat of Deportation in Massachusetts, 1840-1860,” Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Seattle, Washington, March, 2009.
• "Send Them Back to Liverpool: The Irish ‘Round-Trip’ Migration in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,” The Northeast Conference on British Studies, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, November 15, 2008.
• "'Middling’ People: The Social Profile of the Boston Irish and the Meaning of College Education in the Early Twentieth Century,” The New England Historical Association, Endicott College, Beverly, Massachusetts, October 25, 2008.
• "Nativism, Citizenship, and the Deportation of Paupers in Massachusetts, 1848-1877," Brown Bag Lunch Presentation, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts, October 15, 2008.
• “‘Purge the State’: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Deportation of Irish Americans in Antebellum Massachusetts,” Graduate Students in American Studies Programs, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, July 19, 2008.
• “Anti-Foreign Pauperism and Irish ‘Exclusion’ in Massachusetts in the Age of the Civil War,” Annual Meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies, St. Ambrose University, Davenport, Iowa, April 17, 2008.
• “‘The echoes of Faneuil Hall were silent’: Boundaries of Irish Paupers’ Civil Liberty in Know-Nothing Boston,” Graduate Student Conference “Liberty and Freedom during the Civil War Era,” The George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, February 9, 2008.
• “The Search for ‘White’ Order: Irish Workers’ Assertion of Whiteness in Mid-19th Century New York City,” American Conference for Irish Studies (New England Region), October 2006.
• “‘An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure’: The Removal of Foreign Paupers and anti-Irish Nativism in Massachusetts, 1848-1863,” The New England Historical Association, Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, New Hampshire, May 5, 2007.