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Migrations

The Global Studies Migrations Initiative asks how different forms of movement, mobility, and displacement might be studied beyond categorical and national boundaries in ways that take account of the shifting terrains that constitute migrations.

Movements across national borders and forms of mobility and displacement that take place within those borders are typically either conceived as wholly distinct or indistinguishable. Either approach makes it difficult to think rigorously about the diverse and often interrelated processes that influence peoples’ movements and the ways in which they deal with the challenges posed by boundaries of all kinds (national but also class, racial, historical…) and by increasing forms of precariousness. Further, this focus on the people who move often neglects the communities into which they move, obscuring the complex social dynamics that result from their movements. Through this initiative, we hope to draw attention to less visible forms of movement and displacement, such as gentrification, incarceration, professional relocation, and long histories of dispossession and to relate them critically to cross-border migrations and displacements.

Summer School "Cultures, Migrations, Borders"

Observatory of Refugee and Migration Crisis in the Aegean

Virtual Workshop

"Migrations and Borders in the Age of the Pandemic"

November 20-21 , 2020

 

The Summer School “Cultures, Migrations, Borders”of the Department of Social Anthropology and History of the University of the Aegean, Greece, in collaboration with the “Observatory of Refugee and Migration Crisis in the Aegean” (and with the co-sponsorship of the “Global Studies Center”, University of Pittsburgh, and the “Center for European and Russian Studies”, UCLA), will host a virtual two-day workshop on Migrations and Borders in the Age of the Pandemic. The workshop will take place on 20-21 November, 2020.

The first day will be a reflexive, self critical appraisal of the long term experience of teaching and attending the Summer School on Lesvos, an island that occupies an emblematic place in the migration/border regime over the last few years. The panel will be addressed to ex-students and lecturers.

The panels on the second day will be open to the general public and will discuss how the present health crisis offers an opportunity to critically assess the exclusionary potential of bordering against the pandemic, while rethinking the dominant (im)mobility regime.

Confirmed speakers include: 

  • Michel Agier
  • Ruben Andersson
  • Alexandra Bounia
  • Jean Beaman
  • Shahram Khosravi
  • Jason de Leon
  • Hans Lundt
  • Sevasti Trubeta
  • Effie Voutira

Registration information will be provided soon. For further information, please contact Dr. Heath Cabot, Associate Professor of Anthropology

Past Events

Please join us for the 24 Hour viewing of the Documentary Border South (available in English and Spanish) on September 24th, 2020.

Opening installment of the webinar series that seeks to expand transnational, transregional, and interdisciplinary exchange on contemporary and historical issues in Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx Studies:

Friday, October 2, 1-2:30 PM, Virtual, "Transnational Dialogues in Afrolatinidad: Migration, Policing and Political Movements" co-moderated by GSC Faculty Fellow Dr. Michele Reid-Vazquez and Dr. George Reid Andrews, a Distinguished Professor of History.

Featured panelists include: Dr. Eddie Bonilla, UCIS Postdoctoral Fellow in Latinx Studies at the University of Pittsburgh; Dr. Jennifer Jones of the University of Illinois at Chicago; Dr. Zachary Morgan of Penn State University; and Dr. Keisha-Khan Y. Perry of Brown University.

Missed the Webinar? View it here

 

 


Past Events

International Symposium: Deexceptionalizing Displacement? Rethinking Citizenship and Mobility

March 22-23, 2019, University of Pittsburgh 

Organized by: Heath Cabot, University of Pittsburgh and Georgina Ramsay, University of Delaware

With increasing forms of precarity across the globe, there is a need to call attention to sites of struggle that bridge assumed divisions between ”migrants,” “refugees,” and “citizens.” These include access to housing, safety, thriving neighborhoods, healthcare, food, education, childcare, the labor market, and other shared needs. What would it mean to de-exceptionalize displacement, rethinking mobility and citizenship alike

Sponsored By: The Office of the Provost, the Global Studies Center, and the University Center for International Studies (UCIS) at the University of Pittsburgh

Download or view the event flyer here.

 

Undergraduate Conference in the Modern Languages: “Migrations of Cultures”

March 22-23, 2019, University of Pittsburgh

Our keynote speaker will be Dr Katelyn Knox, Asst. Professor of French at the University of Central Arkansas, author of Race on Display in 20th and 21st Century France (University of Liverpool Press, 2016). 

Topics could include:

§  Multilingual societies and their conflicts ("language wars") and advantages

§  Linguistic landscapes and their evolution

§  Translation as a political tool

§  Literatures of the diaspora

§  Circulation of texts through multiple areas and in multiple languages

§  Travel literature through the ages

§  Exiles, migrants, and refugees

§  Processes of acculturation

§  The politics of cultural production

§  Films and the problems of cultural translation

 

Migrations Brown Bag Series

Brown Bag is a monthly seminar for faculty to learn about the research currently going on at Pitt in the area of migrations. Each month a faculty member will give a presentation about their ongoing research projects or an introduction to their research agendas. Students and faculty are encouraged to attend. All events in the Migrations Brown Bag Series will take place in 4130 Posvar Hall.

To receive email announcements, send an email to sbv2@pitt.edu.

Spring 2019

Monday, March 4, 2019

Who: Osea Giuntella (Department of Economics)

Title: "Migration and the health trajectories of immigrants and host country residents"

Description: "Why are immigrant healthier than host country residents despite being poorer? Why does their health deteriorate as they climb the social ladder? What is the impact of immigration on the health care system of receiving countries? What are the health consequences of the labor market effects of immigration on natives? And how does ethnic diversity affect our habits? This talk will try to shed light on some of these questions."

Time: 12:00 to 1:00 pm

Monday, March 18, 2019

Who: Yolanda Covington (Department of Africana Studies)

Title: "Mobility, Displacement, and Black Privilege in the Experiences of Liberian Migrants, Refugees, and Returnees"

Time: 12:00 to 1:00 pm

 

All inquiries can be directed to Prof. Giuseppina Mecchia, at mecchia@pitt.edu.

 

Course on Mobility and Displacement by Heath Cabot (Anthropology)

Th 6:00PM - 8:30PM

What does it mean to belong, or not to belong? What does it mean to be mobile? What is a home, a homeland, home country, or nation? How do experiences of migration, exile, and displacement shift one's understanding of home? Warfare, statecraft, and political violence, and recent environmental and social disasters, are giving rise to forms of belonging, mobility, and displacement that do not fit within traditional categories.  War and political violence destabilize national borders while reinforcing structures of power that bolster or mimic nation-state forms.  Environmental disaster and poverty cause displacements that cannot be classified purely in terms of either "economic" or "forced" migration, but produce composite categories which, as of yet, have no formal legal foothold, such as "economic" or "environmental" refugees. 

 

Spring 2018

Monday, January 28, 2019

Who: Faina Linkov (Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences)

Title: "Global Trends in Migrant Health:Epidemiology Prospective"

Time: 12:00 to 1:00 pm

Fall 2018

Monday, December 3, 2018

Who: Nicole Constable (Department of Anthropology)

Title: “Passports and Migratory Entanglements: Preliminary Thoughts on a Book Project” 

Time: 12:00 to 1:00 pm

Humanities Center workshop on November 29th on El Teatro Campesino:

November 29, 2018 - 12:30pm to 2:00pm

Elizabeth Rodrigues Fielder (English, with responses from Bill Scott (English) and Mike Sell (IUP, English)

During the 1960s and 1970s, American minority artists involved in social movement activism produced work that would seek to revolutionize the relationship between art and politics. My book tells the story of the artistic side of organizing during the civil rights movement, what I refer to as cultural activism. Through performance and experimental media, creative production offered ways for people to debate political ideologies while still maintaining solidarity with the movement. I argue that internal dissent, rather than unity, shaped creative expression emerging from civil-rights-era social movements. The chapter I will workshop centers on the early plays of El Teatro Campesino, a collective ensemble that developed from the strikes and protests that would lead to the creation of the United Farm Workers of America. 

Global Migration: The Case of the Volhynian Germans

Monday, November 5

4:30pm

History Department Lounge, 3703 Posvar Hall

Jan Musekamp will talk on migration schemes of a German-speaking group that used to live in Ukraine. After the 1880s, the worsening economic and political situation in the Russian Empire forced many of these people to move to other regions in the world, such as Siberia, Canada, Brazil or Germany. Eventually, Hitler's population policies put an end to German-speaking settlements in Ukraine, with the descendants scattered all over the world but still connected today.

Sponsored by: University of Pittsburgh's Global Studies Center,

The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State

Thursday, November 1

4:30pm
5201 Posvar Hal

John Torpey will be discussing the new edition of his book The Invention of the Passport. Dr. Torpey is Professor of Sociology and History and Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, CUNY.

Sponsored by: University of Pittsburgh's Global Studies Center,

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amani Attia

ama66@pitt.edu
412-648-1194
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Amani
Attia

Coming from a literature background, Amani Attia is interested in the modern Arabic novel, and modern critical theory. She has written and presented on modern literary works applying theories of postcolonialism, feminism, and deconstruction.

Jerome Branche

branche@pitt.edu
412-624-5468
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Jerome
Branche
Jerome Branche is Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh. His teaching and his research focus on racialized modernity and the way creative writers across the Atlantic imagine and write about slavery, freedom, the nation, being, and gender. He has served on the Executive Board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), and as chair of the Ethnicity, Race, and Indigenous Peoples section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).
 
He is currently serving, as well, as the Secretary/Treasurer of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. At the Instituto he is editing a series of afro-related narratives and critical works, the Serie Malunga.  Branche’s books to date include Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature (Missouri 2006), and The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora: Transatlantic Musings (Routledge 2014).
 
Branche also edited, most recently Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic (Routledge 2018), and Black Writing, Culture and the State in Latin America, and other collections and journal articles. His current book projects study the necropolitics of slavery, and race in the imaginary of empire and its aftermath.

Cynthia Croot

ccroot@pitt.edu
412-624-1890
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Cynthia
Croot
Cynthia Croot is a director, deviser, writer and activist, and serves as Associate Professor and Head of Performance at the University of Pittsburgh. Croot earned her MFA in Directing from Columbia University under the tutelage of Anne Bogart, Robert Woodruff, Andrei Serban, and Kristin Linklater. U.S. directing credits include: John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves and Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar (Perseverance Theatre, Juneau); Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (Colorado Shakespeare Festival); Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and the company-created chamber musical The Millay Sisters (Stonington Opera House) as well as productions in NYC at PS122, HERE, Town Hall, The Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, Symphony Space, and the Guggenheim Museum.
 
A 2007-2009 Fellow of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Directors, Croot is also Resident Director of the NYC-based theatre company Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant. With her company, she has staged experimental audience-immersive and site-specific work in NYC, the Cleveland Public Theatre, OH; The Motherlodge Festival, Louisville, KY; North American Culture Lab, NY; and American Repertory Theatre’s "Club Oberon" in Cambridge, MA. Croot’s direction helped earn Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant two 2012 New York Innovative Theatre Awards. In 2015, she co-founded the activist art collective Ifyoureallyloveme with poet Joy Katz. Their first project: One Large, a piece about race and money, has been performed at the Open Engagement Conference, Pittsburgh, the Theatre Communications Group Conference, Washington, DC, and at Actors Theatre of Louisville, KY.
 
Among her international credits, Croot toured Suzan-Lori Park’s Venus in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, during the historic moment of Sara Baartman's repatriation and burial. Her benefit U.S. stagings of VENUS at the Public Theater and Gatehouse (NYC) featured Tim Robbins, Joe Morton, Jayne Houdyshell, Arliss Howard and Kathleen Chalfant. In 2008 she received a TCG/ITI grant for travel to Croatia for another incarnation of the Venus Project: using it as a lens to examine the sex trafficking industry in Eastern Europe.
 
In 2004/5 Croot represented U.S. artists on a five-person delegation to Damascus University, Syria. This exchange, originally organized by the Center for International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University and the U.S. State Department, helped shape her ongoing commitment to forging cross-cultural understanding through innovative use of the arts and media. Croot has since been a guest speaker at the Fadjr International Theatre Festival in Tehran, and was recently invited to join ArtUp's Sites of Passage – a collaborative project involving partners from the US, Israel and Palestine – interrogating the concepts of borders and nations. In 2017 she launched “Taking Refuge,” an examination of the current refugee crises around the world by artists, activists, journalists, academics, and individuals directly affected by war and political violence. The project premiered last spring in cooperation with Colgate University, the College of Charleston, College of the Holy Cross, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Louisiana State University, Noor Theatre company, Roehampton University UK, the University of Colorado, and Washington College, MD.

Michael Glass

glass@pitt.edu
(412) 648-7459
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Michael
Glass

Dr. Michael Glass is an urbanist who works at the intersection of geography and planning. His primary research is on city-region governance and planning, housing, and urban infrastructure; he has regional expertise in Southeast Asia, North America, and Australasia. He is the co-editor of Performativity, Politics, and the Production of Social Space (Routledge, 2014) and co-author of Priced Out: Stuyvesant Town and the Loss of Middle-Class Neighborhoods (NYU Press, 2016). His most recent research examines the ways that infrastructure shapes regions and influences regional equity. He has published extensively in leading international journals and is on the editorial boards of Asian Geography Journal and Regional Studies, Regional Science. Winner of the 2015 Bellet Award for Teaching Excellence, Dr. Glass is the Director of the Urban Studies Program and serves as the undergraduate advisor.

Shelome Gooden

sgooden@pitt.edu
412-624-5922
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Shelome
Gooden

"I am a native speaker of Jamaican Creole and according to my grandfather, a descendant of the Igbos.  I am a Creolist and Sociolinguist by trade and the main thrust of my research is the prosody of Caribbean Creoles varieties. I guess I should confess that I was a syntactician in a former life (pre graduate school), and in some sense I must have always been interested in the structure of Creole languages, because here I am now looking at higher level phonological structure in these varieties....the 'syntax' (grammatical structure) of intonational melodies.  I was first introduced to structural differences between Jamaican Creole and Standard Jamaican English by my Grade 4 primary school teacher, Eric McKenzie, who asked his class of mostly 9 yr olds to compare sentences in the 2 languages. More than 12 years later I would do a first degree in Linguistics at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in Jamaica where I had the opportunity to learn from pioneers in the field of Creole Linguistics and later on complete both an MA and PhD in Linguistics at The Ohio State University."

Michael Goodhart

goodhart@pitt.edu
412-648-7409
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Michael
Goodhart
   
Michael Goodhart is Professor of Political Science, and he holds secondary appointments in Philosophy and in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. His current research focuses on questions to do with global injustice and responsibility for injustice.  He is also interested in thinking about new modes of political theorizing for the Anthropocene. His core intellectual interests are in the theory and practice of democracy and human rights in the context of globalization and in related questions concerning global justice, democratic governance, and political responsibility at the transnational level.
 
Dr. Goodhart is co-president of the Association for Political Theory; he is an affiliate of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut, a member of the Center for Ethics and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and sits on several editorial boards. In 2008-2009 he was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation research fellow and Guest Professor in the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin. 

Contact about: GSC Research Initiatives, Ideas about Interdiciplinary Projects and Collaboration

Lina Insana

insana@pitt.edu
412-624-6269
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Lina
Insana
Lina Insana’s research and teaching focuses on modern and contemporary Italian cultural production. Most of her work on Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi is concerned with textual mediation, translation, and adaptation; newer research—on Sicilian cultural belonging and manifestations of italianità in the American interwar period (1919-1939)—seeks to interrogate formations of transnational identity at the margins of conventionally-accepted definitions of Italianness.
 
Her first book, Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony (U of Toronto Press, 2009) examines Primo Levi’s testimonial work through the lens of translation, broadly understood as a mediating and interpretive mode that creates spaces of testimonial agency for the survivor-author. This work was recognized both by the MLA (Scaglione Italian Manuscript Prize, 2007) and the American Association of Italian Studies (20th c. Prize, 2009). Her current manuscript-in-progress, “Charting the Island: Sicilian Position and Belonging from Unification to the European Union,” is a geocritical cultural history of Sicilian belonging under the modern Italian State (1861-present), defining belonging not in terms of individual subjectivities but in critical geographical and spatial-rhetorical terms. As its title suggests, the project develops a theory of ‘charting’ as the way in which producers of culture (both individual Sicilian and continental agents, as well as collective or institutional agents such as those that emerge from encyclopedias, journals, tourism brochures, laws, policies, political and military displays, etc.) locate, map out, and generate a variety of Sicilian geocultural positions, as well as the affiliations, associations, and distances that make them possible within configurations such as 'Italy," the "Mediterranean,' and 'Europe.' The book’s analyses draw on extensive research in and attention to three broadly-defined historical periods (post-Unification Italy; Italian Fascism; post-Schengen Italy), each of which illustrates different crises of the Italian body politic to which Sicily has ostensibly belonged since the 1861 unification (or Risorgimento) of Italy. Charting the Island draws on both literary and non-literary texts from the last hundred years or so: Messina's post-earthquake urban shantytown; Mussolini’s 1937 visit to Sicily to project military force from the island to war-torn Spain on one hand and its nascent Empire on the other; the proposed construction of the Bridge of the Straits; the political theatre of immigration and the symbolic valence of Lampedusa.
 
She is also engaged in a third book-length project that explores expressions of italianità in North American Italian “colonies” between the first and second World Wars through institutions and cultural icons that helped immigrant communities to negotiate complex and often competing civic identities. Her work in Italian American Studies also extends to research on children’s literature (“Strega Nona’s Ethnic Alchemy,” MELUS 31.2) and teaching (“Italian America on Screen”).
 
Prof. Insana has served two terms (2013-2019) as Chair of the Department of French & Italian (serving as summer Chair from 2010-2013) and has been Director of Graduate Studies in Italian since 2010. From 2016-2018 she was Chair of Pitt's Humanities Council. Since 2012 she has been the lead organizer of Pittsburgh’s Italian Film Festival USA, a curated festival of contemporary Italian Cinema that takes place every spring on Pitt’s campus.

John Lyon

jblyon@pitt.edu
412-624-5839
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John
B.
Lyon
John Lyon teaches courses ranging from both graduate and undergraduate seminars on Literary and Cultural Theory, Realism, Romanticism, and Aesthetic History, to large-enrollment undergraduate lectures on Indo-European Folktales.
 
His research interests include German literature, philosophy and culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his book, Crafting Flesh, Crafting the Self: Violence and Identity in Early 19th Century German Literature (Bucknell University Press, 2006), he analyzes wounded human bodies in early nineteenth-century German literature and traces their connection to changing philosophical models of the self.
 
His most recent book, Out of Place. German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2013), reads the literature of German Realism (Raabe, Keller, and Fontane) in terms of philosophical conceptions of place, specifically as a reaction to the changing sense of place resulting from the rise of capitalism, industrialism, and the metropolis during the nineteenth century.
 
He has co-edited volumes on Goethe, Fontane, and Joint Authorship in the Age of Goethe and published articles on German Realism, Theodor Fontane, Wilhelm Raabe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Georg Büchner, Clemens Brentano, Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Caspar Lavater, Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schiller and presented widely on topics in eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, culture, and philosophy.

Barbara McCloskey

bmcc@pitt.edu
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Barbara
McCloskey

Barbara McCloskey has published widely on the relationship between art and politics in 20th century German art, the visual culture of World War II, and artistic mediations of the experience of exile in the modern and contemporary eras.  Her most recent book, The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order, was published by University of California Press in January 2015.  Her lecture courses and seminars cover the history of art in 20th century Germany, international Dada and Surrealism, critical theory, and art historical methodology.  Graduate students working under her supervision have developed MA and PhD theses on topics ranging from art and photography in Weimar and the Third Reich to studies of 1930s American muralism and leftist art history, East German art and design, Czech surrealism, and issues of nationalism and populism in Russian fin-de-siéclè and early 20th century Croatian art.  Many of her students have competed successfully for prestigious national and international awards including DAAD, Wolfsonian, Fulbright, Berlin Prize, and Fulbright-Hayes fellowships.

Josephine Olson

jolson@katz.pitt.edu
412-648-1715
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Josephine
Olson
Josephine (Jo) Olson teaches courses in managerial economics and international economics, and has conducted study trips to Europe and Latin America. She is an associate of the Center for Latin American Studies, the European Studies Center, the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Asian Studies Center, and the Global Studies Program. From 2006 to 2014 she was Director of the International Business Center. She was secretary of the University Senate from 2002 to 2005. She previously served as director of MBA Programs and Associate Dean. Prior to coming to the University of Pittsburgh, she was on the faculty of Bernard M. Baruch College, City University of New York.
 
Jo’s research interests include topics in international economics and a study of career paths and income determinants of MBAs.
 
Jo has been a member of the District Export Council of Western Pennsylvania since 2008. Earlier she served for 12 years as a member of the Board of Trustees of Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA). In the fall of 1991 she was a Fulbright Fellow at the International Management Center in Budapest, Hungary. She was visiting professor of economics at the Czechoslovak Management Center in winter 1992. In 1993-94 she was a visiting professor at Nyenrode University in the Netherlands and in 1994-95 she was academic dean and interim CEO of the Czech Management Center. She has consulted with public and private agencies with regard to public policy toward transportation and utility rate-setting and international economics. She has also done some educational consulting.

B. Guy Peters

bgpeters@pitt.edu
412-648-7286
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B. Guy
Peters

"I am currently working on two major book projects.  One is on the “Inclusive State”, that will discuss the processes by which states develop more inclusive policies and practices.  The second is on alternative forms of governance–hierarchy, markets, society, expertise and participation–and the choices that must be made among them.  In addition I am launching an international research project on political patronage, building on a recently completed book on Latin America and another forthcoming book on Asia."

Michele Reid-Vazquez

mbr31@pitt.edu
412-624-7206
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Michele
Reid-Vazquez

Each year, the GSC selects as its Faculty Fellow one outstanding University of Pittsburgh colleague whose scholarship advances the Center's mission. Michele Reid-Vazquez is Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and a specialist in African Diaspora in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Atlantic World, and Afro-Latinx History in the U.S. As the 2020-2021 GSC Faculty Fellow, Dr. Reid-Vazquez will convene an interdisciplinary conference entitled, "Transnational Dialogues in Afrolatinidad" and create a new undergraduate course that will feature a student research poster exhibit. The goal of the project is to expand transnational, transregional, and interdisciplinary research, education, and programming in the global arenas of Afro-Latin American Afro-Latinx studies. The intersections of race, ethnicity, and migration continue to shape contemporary societies through the complex confluence of blackness and identity in the Americas. These endeavors will facilitate scholarly knowledge and expand our understanding of Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx studies and the global issues at its core. 

Burcu Savun

burcu@pitt.edu
412-648-7281
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Burcu
Savun

Burcu Savun is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in International Relations. Her primary research interests include civil wars, terrorism, conflict resolution, forced migration, and refugees. Her research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Journal of Peace Research.

John Walsh

jpw64@pitt.edu
412-624-6223
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John
Walsh
Professor Walsh’s research and teaching take shape at the intersection of Caribbean Studies, especially the literature and history of Haiti, Francophone Postcolonial Studies more broadly, and the Environmental Humanities. He works on contemporary literature, as well as the texts and media of earlier periods of the French Atlantic and Caribbean. He also focuses on theories of transnationalism and globalization.
 
His first book, Free and French in the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire and Narratives of Loyal Opposition (Indiana UP, 2013), is a work of literary and historical analysis of the texts of Toussaint Louverture and Aimé Césaire and the two events that defined them, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the transformation of Martinique from French colony to overseas department (1946). Free and French in the Caribbean makes two central claims: the revolution and departmentalization share a deep connection, despite a narrative that long opposed Haitian independence to the assimilation of Martinique into France; and the writings of both statesmen-authors reveal the colonial origins of French republicanism. The book proposes a narrative filiation between Toussaint and Césaire in order to problematize the apparent union of universal rights and sovereignty that supports the republican principle of “Free and French,” a phrase pronounced in the first French abolition of slavery in 1794 and reiterated in Toussaint’s 1801 Constitution.
 
His second book, Migration and Refuge: An Eco-Archive of Haitian Literature, 1982-2017 (Liverpool UP, 2019), argues that contemporary Haitian literature historicizes the political and environmental problems brought to the surface by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti by building on texts of earlier generations, especially at the end of the Duvalier era (1957-1986) and its aftermath. Informed by Haitian studies and models of postcolonial ecocriticism, the book conceives of literature as an “eco-archive,” or a body of texts that depicts ecological change over time and its impact on social and environmental justice. Focusing equally on established and less well-known authors, the book contends that the eco-archive challenges future-oriented, universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene and the global refugee crisis with portrayals of different forms and paths of migration and refuge within Haiti and around the Americas.
 
Professor Walsh has advised graduate dissertations and undergraduate honors theses in interdisciplinary projects on many forms of cultural production and on a range of topics, including, among others, migration, transnational identity, humanitarianism, and environmental justice. He enjoys collaborating with colleagues and students in the department and across the Humanities to organize lectures and conferences that bring distinguished scholars, writers, and artists to Pitt.