Speaker: Lauren Braun-Strumfels, Raritan Valley Community College

This talk offers a corrective to the literature on the 1891 lynching of eleven Italians in New Orleans that tends to focus on the crime in the domestic sphere, and leaves out the powerful and significant repercussions in Italian-U.S. diplomatic relations that expanded the Italian mission to specifically include the protection of immigrants. Following the lynching the diplomatic service would become increasingly focused on cultural and political moves toward restricting Italians from entering the U.S. This talk will show why a broader lens capturing the action of the Italian state is essential to understand the creation of the U.S. as a gatekeeping nation.

Lauren Braun-Strumfels is an Assistant Professor of History at Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey. She is currently on research sabbatical and will become the Co-Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship in Fall 2018. She earned her Ph.D. in U.S. labor and immigration history from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2010. In 2014 she held the inaugural American Academy in Rome - Community College Humanities Association Affiliated Fellowship. Her work has been supported in recent years by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society.