- University of Zurich, Switzerland, History, Faculty Memberadd
Job opening in Kristiansand, Norway: Associate Professor Transnational History.
Memories of Belonging is a three-generation oral-history study of the offspring of southern Italians who migrated to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1913. Supplemented with the interviewees’ private documents and working from U.S. and... more
Memories of Belonging is a three-generation oral-history study of the offspring of southern Italians who migrated to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1913.
Supplemented with the interviewees’ private documents and working from U.S. and Italian archives, Christa Wirth documents a century of transatlantic migration, assimilation, and later-generation self-identification. Her research reveals how memories of migration, everyday life, and ethnicity are passed down through the generations, altered, and contested while constituting family identities.
The fact that not all descendants of Italian migrants moved into the U.S. middle class, combined with their continued use of hyphenated identities, points to a history of lived ethnicity and societal exclusion. Moreover, this book demonstrates the extent of forgetting that is required in order to construct an ethnic identity.
Supplemented with the interviewees’ private documents and working from U.S. and Italian archives, Christa Wirth documents a century of transatlantic migration, assimilation, and later-generation self-identification. Her research reveals how memories of migration, everyday life, and ethnicity are passed down through the generations, altered, and contested while constituting family identities.
The fact that not all descendants of Italian migrants moved into the U.S. middle class, combined with their continued use of hyphenated identities, points to a history of lived ethnicity and societal exclusion. Moreover, this book demonstrates the extent of forgetting that is required in order to construct an ethnic identity.
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Research Interests: Cold War and Colonization
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Der »Kalte Krieg« wurde in der zweiten Halfte des 20. Jahrhunderts zur gelaufigen Beschreibung der Pattsituation zwischen den beiden Supermachten USA und UdSSR. Obschon die Forschung hierzu in den letzten Jahren neues Terrain erschlossen... more
Der »Kalte Krieg« wurde in der zweiten Halfte des 20. Jahrhunderts zur gelaufigen Beschreibung der Pattsituation zwischen den beiden Supermachten USA und UdSSR. Obschon die Forschung hierzu in den letzten Jahren neues Terrain erschlossen hat, wurde der semantische Kern des Konflikts – die Metapher der Kalte – bisher kaum ausgelotet. Das aktuelle Jahrbuch versucht, diese Lucke zu schliesen, indem es die Frage stellt, wie die Kalte in unterschiedlichen militarischen, politischen, wissenschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Bereichen des Kalten Krieges mobilisiert wurde und damit zum tatsachlichen und imaginierten Konflikt beitrug. Der Band enthalt Beitrage etwa zu einer geheimen U-Boot-Werft im rauen Norden der Sowjetunion, zur U.S.-amerikanischen Militarbasis »Camp Century« im Packeis Gronlands und zur raumfahrtsmedizinischen Forschung zur perfekten Temperierung von Astronautenkorpern. Neben diesen Temperaturexplorationen an multiplen »frontiers« des Kalten Krieges geht der Band auch d...
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Research Interests: History and Colonialism
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In the 1950s and 1960s scholars from the University of Chicago and the Ateneo de Manila created social scientific knowledge that helped establish the Peace Corps as a Cold War institution in the Philippines. Central were the social... more
In the 1950s and 1960s scholars from the University of Chicago and the Ateneo de Manila created social scientific knowledge that helped establish the Peace Corps as a Cold War institution in the Philippines. Central were the social scientists at the University of Chicago and the Ateneo de Manila University who established a knowable postcolonial subject: "the Filipino," which resulted from their research on Philippine values. In this context, the Ateneo/Chicago social scientists developed the "SIR," the "smooth interpersonal relation" model that entails the notion that Filipinos and Filipinas particularly valued this nonconfrontational skill set among people. The SIR model was taught by social science experts to early Peace Corps volunteers as they prepared for their assignments in the Philippines. The article shows how the SIR model could cause distress and confusion as it was applied by Peace Corps volunteers in the Philippines.
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Christa Wirth uber: Fischer-Tine, Harald: Pidgin-Knowledge. Wissen und Kolonialismus. Zurich 2013.
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The “cultural turn” of the 1980s led to a shift within history and other related disciplines. New methodological and theoretical paradigms consolidated this linguistically inspired turn, which, among other objectives, aims to deconstruct... more
The “cultural turn” of the 1980s led to a shift within history and other related disciplines. New methodological and theoretical paradigms consolidated this linguistically inspired turn, which, among other objectives, aims to deconstruct the master-narratives in historiography. Memory studies is one of the products which spun off the turn. “Individual,” “communicative,” “collective,” “social,” “public,” and “private” memories have been vividly and broadly debated in the past twenty years. The purpose of this article is to outline how the memory paradigm has been received in migration research. The focus lies on the following questions: How do migrants and their descendants construct memories of migration, settlement, and “integration”? What experiences have been forgotten? How do nations remember (or in some cases forget) and commemorate their migrant histories? How do individuals and groups, who are mobile, carry or challenge national master-narratives? What sources have researchers relied on to unwind the strands of memory? And what theoretical frameworks were applied? Memory and migration in this article are discussed within the time frame of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Keywords: cultural diversity; immigration; ethnic cleansing; gender; war; violence
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Die Geschichte der Schweiz stand lange Zeit im Zeichen des Besonderen – des Sonderfalls. Die helvetische Historiografie unterscheidet sich darin nicht wesentlich von der Geschichtsschreibung anderer Lander. Nationalgeschichten bleiben... more
Die Geschichte der Schweiz stand lange Zeit im Zeichen des Besonderen – des Sonderfalls. Die helvetische Historiografie unterscheidet sich darin nicht wesentlich von der Geschichtsschreibung anderer Lander. Nationalgeschichten bleiben oft in einem methodologischen Nationalismus gefangen. Eine wachsende Zahl von Historikern und Historikerinnen hat sich in den letzten Jahren davon zu befreien versucht. Sie setzen den Akzent auf die «Zirkulation» von Menschen, Technologien und Wissen, erproben «transnationale» oder «globale» Zugange, schreiben «vergleichende», «geteilte» und «postkoloniale» Geschichte, bemuhen sich um eine «histoire connectee» oder «histoire croisee». Dieser Band versammelt Texte, die solche Ansatze auf verschiedene Perioden der Schweizer Geschichte anwenden. Er versteht sich als Beitrag zur Diskussion uber das Erbe, die Herausforderungen und die Perspektiven von transnationalen Ansatzen in der Wirtschafts-, Sozial-, Politik- und Kulturgeschichte. = L’histoire de la ...
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Christa Wirth uber: Fischer-Tine, Harald: Pidgin-Knowledge. Wissen und Kolonialismus. Zurich 2013.
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This three-generation oral history study offers insight into why descendants of Italian migrants to the United States still choose hyphenated identities today. The research project shows how the meaning of Italianness shifts among the... more
This three-generation oral history study offers insight into why descendants of Italian migrants to the United States still choose hyphenated identities today. The research project shows how the meaning of Italianness shifts among the interviewees depending on class affiliation: among the middle-class offspring the use of the hyphen can be understood mainly as a reaction to the experienced pressure to give in to Anglo conformity. Among the blue-collar, urban progeny, Italianness expresses itself as a combination of an experienced ethnic environment on the one hand and a symbolic ethnicity on the other.
