I am a historian of migration in the Americas, with a particular focus on both Argentina and Canada. In addition to my teaching in the UBC History Department, I am also chair of the Latin American Studies program (2022-2025). Beyond UBC, I am the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association.

My first monograph, To Belong in Buenos Aires: Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society (Stanford University Press, 2018) and its translation, Ser de Buenos Aires: Alemanes, argentinos y el surgimiento de una sociedad plural, 1880-1930 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2019), chronicle the activities and fantasies of the people who sought to create a lasting German community in the Argentine capital and the behaviour of others who undermined their project. Across ethnic groups, gender and class hierarchies shaped community institutions. The typically male-led organizations fostered structures that created paternalistic relationships between wealthy and working-class immigrants and patriarchal hierarchies between men and women. Focusing on childhood, education, and social welfare, the book argues that ideas about the future drove thousands of German-speaking immigrants to carve out a place for ethnicity and pluralism in the cultural, religious, and linguistic landscape of Buenos Aires. It provides a timely reminder of how national identities in the Americas were built on cultural pluralism and multilingualism.

My newest monograph, The Boundaries of Ethnicity: German Immigration and the Language of Belonging in Ontario(forthcoming, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) argues that children, parents, teachers, and religious communities shaped the nature of cultural pluralism in Ontario society. Taking German speakers as an illustrative case study, it demonstrates how people drew and re-drew the boundaries around groups defined by language, heritage, or denomination. In so doing, they created overlapping and contradictory visions of ethnic difference and civic belonging in Canadian society. This book uncovers some of the origins of Canadian multiculturalism and government attempts to manage that diversity.

I have been increasingly influenced by the “new ethnic studies” approach in Latin American history. Breaking with the common approach to look at a single group based on a shared national or ethnic origin, much can be learned by emphasizing the commonalities among groups and their relationship with one another and the surrounding society. One of my first steps in this direction has been a SSHRC-funded book project titled Healing the Nation: Health, Philanthropy, and Ethnicity in Argentina, 1880-1955. It analyzes the involvement of various immigrant groups in the evolving health care system of Buenos Aires. It casts light on the relationship between liberalism and cultural pluralism, the origins of the welfare state, and the importance of non-governmental actors in state formation in the Americas. Rather than focusing on the particularities of an individual ethnic group, this book project charts the role of Italian, Spanish, Syrian-Lebanese, Jewish, British, German, and French immigrants in questions of health and community organization. Through health, community leaders gained social status, fulfilled self-created obligations, and attempted to solidify the place of different European ethnicities in Argentine society.

I continue with this cross-group approach in my newest research. Funded by another SSHRC Insight Grant, Grounds for Exclusion: Immigration, Race, Health, and Gender in Argentina, 1876-1940 highlights the range of ways that bureaucrats, politicians, and nationalist agitators developed both formal and informal methods to exclude. In the view of many Argentine politicians and bureaucrats, South Asians, Japanese, Chinese, and Roma and to a lesser extent eastern European Jews and Ottoman subjects challenged the very reason for opening the country to immigration in the first place. Alongside these concerns about race, unmarried women, people with disabilities, and workers in ill health were also prevented from boarding ships bound for Buenos Aires, denied entry to the country, or excluded from the social and civic rights afforded to most other immigrants.

You can find my CV here and my website here.