Department of History | The University of Chicago

The University of Chicago
Department of History
1126 E. 59th Street, Mailbox 77
Chicago, IL 60637
(773)702-8381 -- Office
(773) 702-7550 -- Fax
Email: k-conzen@uchicago.edu

Field Specialties
American Urban History; Immigration and Ethnicity; Rural History; Western Settlement; Nineteenth-Century Social History.

Biography

Kathleen Conzen's research and teaching focus on the social and political history of the United States in the 19th century, with a special interest in issues of immigration, ethnicity, religion, western settlement, and urban development. She teaches courses and seminars on American urban history, 19th century social history, the peopling of the U.S., western and rural history, and 19th century political culture. Much of her research and writing has used the German immigrant experience to explore the links between migration processes and community formation, the construction and reconstruction of ethnic identities, the the relationship between religious, ethnic, and regional cultures, and the political integration of immigrants into the national community. Current projects include books nearing completion on 19th century German-American efforts to develop and defend a theory of pluralistic democratic nationalism, and on German peasant settlement in the frontier Midwest, and work-in-progress on America's diasporic German Catholic milieu, and on patterns of rural-to-urban migration in the 19th and early 20th century U.S.

Publications

Germans in Minnesota (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2003)

“Ethnicity and Musical Culture among the German Catholics of the Sauk, 1854-1920,” in Philip V. Bohlman and Otto Holzapfel, eds., Land without Nightingales: Music in the Making of German-America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 31-71

“German-Catholic Communalism and the American Civil War: Exploring the Dilemmas of Transatlantic Political Integration,” in Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt and Hermann Wellenreuther, eds., Bridging the Atlantic: Europe and the United States in Modern Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 119-44

"Phantom Landscapes of Colonization: Germans in the Making of a Pluralist America," in Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore, eds., The German-American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures, 1800-2000 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 7-21

"Pi-ing the Type: Jane Grey Swisshelm and the Contest of Midwestern Regionality," in Andrew L. Cayton and Susan Gray, eds., The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 91-110

“German Catholics in America,” in Michael Glazier and Thomas J. Shelley, eds., The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1997), 571-83

"The Winnebago Urban System: Indian Policy and Townsite Promotion on the Upper Mississippi," in Rondo Cameron, ed., Cities and Markets: Studies in the Organization of Human Space (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997), 269-310

“Forum: The Place of Religion in Urban and Community Studies,” Religion and American Culture, 6 (1996), 108-114

"The Stories Immigrants Tell," Swedish American Historical Quarterly 46 (1995), 49-57

"A Saga of Families," in Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Conner, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds., Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 315-57

"Ethnic Patterns in American Cities: Historiographical Trends," in Swedes in America: New Perspectives, ed. Ulf Beijbom (Växjö, Sweden: Swedish Emigrant Institute, 1993), 24-32

"Mainstreams and Side Channels: The Localization of Immigrant Cultures," Journal of American Ethnic History, 11 (1991), pp. 5-20

"Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Agricultiral History," In Agriculture and National Development: Views on the Nineteenth Century, ed. Louis Ferleger (Iowa State University Press, 1990), pp. 303-342

"The Invention of Ethnicity,” co-authored with David A. Gerber, Ewa Morawska, George E. Pozzetta, and Rudolph J. Vecoli, Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (1992), 3-41

"Ethnicity as Festive Culture: German-America on Parade," in The Invention of Ethnicity, ed. Werner Sollors (Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 44-76

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Kathleen Neils Conzen

Professor of History
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison 1972