In collaboration with our colleagues at Teachers College and Barnard, the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement invites the Columbia community to attend a panel discussion on historian Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish became White. This book traces how Irish immigrants, who fled oppression in their country in the 18th century, achieved acceptance among an initially hostile US population by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists had been.

Our panel will consist of Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History and Interim Vice Provost Ira Katznelson, PhD, as well as Rebecca A Kobrin, PhD, Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History and Director of the Institute for Jewish Studies, and Timothy Patrick McCarthy, PhD, Lecturer and Core Faculty at Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. June Cross, Professor of Journalism, will serve as introlocutor.

The format will be 90 minutes long, with a 45-minute panel discussion followed by a 45-minute breakout book club conversation. Faculty, students, and staff are invited to participate in the book discussion, which will take place in separate breakout rooms.

NOTE: There will be an informal book discussion following the panel at 11:15. If you wish to attend, please register for the panel (in bold above) AND the discussion.

ZOOM REGISTRATION for students/staff:
https://tinyurl.com/staff-student-discussion-Irish

ZOOM REGISTRATION for Faculty:
https://tinyurl.com/faculty-book-discussion-Irish

Panel:

Ira Katznelson is Columbia University’s Interim Provost, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, and Deputy Director, Columbia World Projects. His 2013 Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time was awarded the Bancroft Prize in History and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award in Political Science. Other books include Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction (2018; co-authored with David Bateman and John Lapinski), and Liberal Beginnings: A Republic for the Moderns (2008; co-authored with Andreas Kalyvas). Professor Katznelson, a fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, is a former president both of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science Research Council. He earned his BA at Columbia College and his PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, where he served in 2017-2018 as Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions. Prior to his arrival at Columbia in 1994, where he also had been an assistant and associate professor, he had taught at the University of Chicago, where he served as Chair of the Department of Political Science, and the New School for Social Research, where he was Dean of the Graduate Faculty.

Rebecca Kobrin works in the fields of immigration history and American Jewish History. Professor Kobrin served as the Hilda Blaustein Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (2002-2004) and the American Academy of Jewish Research Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University (2004-2006). Her areas of specialty include American Jewish history, immigration history, international history, and Jewish economic history. Her research, teaching and publications engage in the fields of international history, urban history, Jewish history, American religion and diaspora studies.

Timothy Patrick McCarthy is an award-winning historian, educator, and human rights activist who has taught on Harvard’s faculty since 2005. The adopted only son and grandson of public school teachers and factory workers, Dr. McCarthy currently holds a joint appointment in the undergraduate honors program in History and Literature, Graduate School of Education, and Kennedy School of Government, where he is Core Faculty at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He is also Academic Director emeritus and now Stanley Paterson Professor of American History in the Boston Clemente Course, a free college course for lower income adults in Dorchester, where he has taught since its founding in 2001. The Clemente Course was co-recipient of the 2015 National Humanities Medal.

June Cross is an award-winning producer and writer with over thirty years of television news and documentary experience. She is currently in pre-production on a film about HIV in rural America, and researching a story in Pakistan. Her latest documentary, “The Old Man and the Storm,” followed the travails of an extended New Orleans family for three years post-Katrina, aired on PBS’ “Frontline” in early 2009.