Gatekeeping as Geopolitics: U.S. Immigration Policy and American Global Power

Paul A. Kramer is an Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, with research and teaching interests in U. S. global histories since the mid-19th century. He is the author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), winner of the 2007 Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize given by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the 2007 James A. Rawley Prize given by the Organization of American Historians. He is the author of numerous articles and two of his essays, "The Water Cure," and "A Useful Corner of the World: Guantánamo," have been published by the New Yorker. He is co-editor of "The United States in the World," a series published by Cornell University Press, and is currently at work on a book-length project, from which this talk is drawn, on the geopolitics of U. S. immigration control across the 20th century. Professor Kramer will also hold a meeting with graduate students to discuss the current state of transnational history.