HistoryHub
Connecting past and present
History Hub presents – A history of xenophobia: from the goldmines to the rise of the far right today – a series of interviews between our editor, Dr Irial Glynn, and a number of world-leading experts on the history of xenophobia.
Does it stem from anger related to a real or perceived decline in living standards? Does it reflect discomfort with the pace of social change or increasing societal diversity? Or is it connected to the arrival of charismatic and innovative politicians and well-organised far right parties?
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Listen to the series by subscribing on Apple, Spotify and Soundcloud. Subscribing is totally free of charge. Explore the individual episodes, and learn more about the interviewees in the series, below.
About Elizabeth Buettner
Elizabeth Buettner has been Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam since 2014. Her research has centered on British imperial, social, cultural, and migration history since the late nineteenth century along with other European nations’ histories of late colonialism, decolonization, and their domestic ramifications.
Key publications include:
About William Brustein
William Brustein is Eberly Family Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at West Virginia University where he was also formerly Vice President for Global Strategies and International Affairs.
He has published widely in the areas of political extremism and ethnic/religious/racial prejudice. His publications include:
About Maddalena Marinari
Dr Maddalena Marinari is Associate Professor in History at Gustavus College in Minnesota. Maddalena has published extensively on immigration restriction and immigrant mobilization.
She is the author of Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization Against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882-1965 which came out in 2020 with University of North Carolina Press, and provides the foundation for much of the discussion in this episode since it focuses on US opposition to Italian and Jewish immigrants in the late 19th century and early 20th century and outlines how Italian and Jewish communities in the US responded.
Something that also informed the discussion is a special issue of the Journal of American History from 2022 that Maddalena co-edited with Erika Lee on the Immigration Act of 1924, which saw the US introduce an immigration quota system that substantially restricted immigration until the mid-1960s. Maddelena also co-edited, with Maria Cristina Garcia and Madeline Hsu, A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965 and she has a second related co-edited anthology coming out in 2023 with Maria Cristina Garcia titled Whose America? U.S. Immigration Policy since 1980 with the University of Illinois Press.
Maddelena is also one of the scholars behind the excellent #ImmigrationSyllabus, an online tool for anyone interested in understanding the history behind current debates on immigration in the US.
About Kathryn Pillay
Dr Kathryn Pillay is senior lecturer in sociology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her areas of teaching and research include that of ‘race’, migration, identity and belonging. Her most recent publication is the co-edited volume, Relating Worlds of Racism – Dehumanisation, Belonging and the Normativity of European Whiteness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), which unmasks and foregrounds the ways in which notions of European whiteness have found form in a variety of global contexts that continue to sustain racism as an operational norm resulting in exclusion, violence, human rights violations, isolation and limited full citizenship for individuals who are not racialised as white.
About Mae Ngai
Mae M. Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. She is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in the histories of immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and the Chinese diaspora. She is author of the award winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004); The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (2010); and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021). Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, the Nation, and Dissent. Before becoming a historian she was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education. She is now writing Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea (under contract with Princeton University Press).
About Marilyn Lake
Marilyn Lake AO is Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne. Her books include ‘Drawing the Global Line: White men’s countries and the international challenge of racial equality’, co-authored with Henry Reynolds and published by Cambridge University Press; and ‘Progressive New World: How TransPacific exchange and settler colonialism shaped American reform’, published by Harvard University Press in 2019.
About Hidetaka Hirota
Hidetaka Hirota is Associate Professor in the Department of History at University of California Berkeley. He is a social and legal historian of the United States specializing in immigration. His major areas of research are the nineteenth-century United States; American immigration law and policy; the U.S. and the World; and transnational history. He is particularly interested in the history of American nativism and immigration control. His published works have examined the origins and early developments of U.S. immigration policy from the antebellum period to the Progressive Era. Adopting a social and legal history approach, his scholarship pays equal attention to the legal dimension of immigration control and the practical implementation of immigration laws on the ground.
About Leo Lucassen
Leo Lucassen is Professor of Global Labour and Migration History and director of the International Institute of Social History (IISH). His research focuses on Global Migration History, Integration, Migration Systems, Migration Controls, Gypsies and the state, State Formation and Modernity, and Urban History. Leo wants to stimulate interdisciplinary research on migration history and contribute to the public debate on migration.
About Elisabeth Ivarsflaten
Elisabeth Ivarsflaten is a Professor in the Department of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen. She is the principal investigator of the Digital Social Science Core Facility (DIGSSCORE) and the Norwegian Citizen Panel at the University of Bergen.
Ivarsflaten holds a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford and was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, before joining the University of Bergen faculty. She specializes in the study of public opinion and political parties. Her research has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, and other peer-reviewed journals. Much of Ivarsflaten research, teaching and writing explores radical extreme right parties and social movements. She has also been engaged for many years in the development and application of innovative survey research.
About Ruth Wodak
Ruth Wodak is an Austrian linguist, who is Emeritus Distinguished Professor and Chair in Discourse Studies in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University and Professor in Linguistics at the University of Vienna.
Her research is mainly located in discourse studies and in critical discourse analysis. Her books include: ‘The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean’ and ‘The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual’.
About Lars Rensmann
Lars Rensmann is Professor of Political Science and Comparative Government at the University of Passau, Germany. Before joining Passau’s faculty, he was Professor European Politics and Society and Founding Director of the Research Centre for the Study of Democratic Cultures and Politics at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, where he also served as the Chair of the Department of European Languages and Cultures and led the chair group of European Politics and Society. He is a member of several scientific and editorial boards, including the Journal of International Political Theory.
Series host Irial Glynn and Yanli Xie discuss the reasons for making the series A history of xenophobia – from the goldmines to the rise of the far right today.
Irial Glynn
Dr Irial Glynn is a migration historian based at UCD School of History. His research focuses principally on the period after 1945. His current research principally revolves around three projects: 1) a comparative analysis of how migration has affected Irish society since 1945, 2) a global history of boat refugees since the 1940s, and 3) a study of how nativism has developed globally since the late 19th century.
In 2023 he was awarded €2m in funding as part of an ERC Consolidator grant for his study entitled ‘SOS’. This project will investigate the history of boat refugees since the 1940s, asking who hinders and who helps asylum seekers on their journeys, and why. He is the co-editor of History Hub at UCD.
Yanli Xie
Dr Yanli Xie is a tutor in UCD School of History. Her PhD looked at the role of railway technology transfer in the West-East interactions and the Anglo-Chinese relations from 1860s to 1890s.
UCD offers a variety of study options and entry pathways, ranging from full-time degrees to short-term courses for pure interest. Lifelong Learning offers all adult learners the opportunity to explore a subject of their choice without the pressure of an examination. Open Learning is a flexible way of studying part-time at UCD. Explore your history options for the coming year.
Dr Mark Jones is Assistant Professor in Global History at University College Dublin. A specialist in the history of political violence, war, and revolution, his publications include ‘Founding Weimar. Violence and the German Revolution of 1918-19 (Cambridge University Press, 2016). His latest book is ‘1923: The Forgotten Crisis in the Year of Hitler’s Coup’. This podcast ‘The murder of Walter Rathenau and the survival of Weimar democracy. Mark Jones on the year 1923’ is based on this latest book.
The first in-person meeting of the Military Welfare History Network took place in Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin on 7 July 2023. The event, which was co-ordinated by Dr Paul Huddie, comprised two keynotes and four panels, totalling 14 speakers. Conference keynotes by Dr Matthew Neufeld (University of Saskatchewan) and Dr Ke-Chin Hsia (Indiana University Bloomington) were recorded and are now available to podcast.
In June 2023 Professor Caitríona Beaumont (LSBU / UCD) joined UCD historians Dr Mary McAuliffe and Dr Fionnuala Walsh to record a podcast on a new project: AFTERLIVES.
The aim of the project is to uncover the afterlives and trace the life stories of lesser known activist women. As Beaumont explains, the inspiration for the project came from a surprising discovery.
On 8 March 2023, UCD School of History hosted ‘Writing LGBTQ histories from the medieval to the modern’. This event featured UCD historians Dr Elva Johnston, Dr Mary McAuliffe and Dr Fionnuala Walsh (Chair).
History Hub presents a series of interviews between our editor Dr Irial Glynn and a number of leading experts on the history of xenophobia.
On the 9th of November 2022, Roger Moorhouse presented ‘The Łados Group and the attempted rescue of Polish Jews’, a public lecture to coincide with the anniversary of the November Pogrom. The lecture took place in Trinity College Dublin and was co-organised by Holocaust Education Ireland, The Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Ireland, UCD School of History, and TCD School of Histories and Humanities.
On 6 October 2022 Dr. Hájková came to UCD to give a lecture jointly organised by University College Dublin Centre for War Studies, Holocaust Education Ireland and the UCD History Seminar Series in Gender History. In her talk she explored the intersection of queer and Holocaust history through the example of an enforced relationship between two women, a guard and a Jewish woman, in a concentration camp in winter 1945.
