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This lecture and discussion over Zoom covers the practical do’s and don’t’s of launching your first academic book, with an eye towards both the steps you can take to help get your ideas out into the world, and the role this process can play for academic exchange and building and sustaining intellectual community.

This introduction to a special forum on refugees in North American history discusses variations in scholars’ approaches to refugees, with some reconstructing the historical experiences, strategies, itineraries, and perspectives of refugees, and others focusing on the political work of the category and figure of the refugee, as delineating the causes of dislocation and the extent and limits of states’ responsibilities.

This narrative piece, selected by The Best American Essays 2012 as a “notable essay,” tells the story of Rev. Jesse Routté, an African American Lutheran minister in New York who, in response to racist abuse during a 1943 trip to Mobile, Alabama, returned four years later disguised as a turbaned, Swedish-accented “foreigner.” When he reported positive treatment, it flaunted contradictions in Jim Crow’s racial definitions.