Much of Canadian immigration historiography has focused on the first generation immigrants, including two important collections on German immigrants in Canada published in 1998 and 2012. While scholars have increasingly looked at the 1.5 and second generations, they have tended to conceptualize them as distinct categories or generations.
This proposed collection of articles, focusing on the experiences, histories, and memories of German immigrants in Canada and their descendants, seeks to explore how multi-generational families and groups have interacted and shaped each other’s integration and adaption in Canadian society. As one of Canada’s oldest and largest ethnic groups, German-Canadians allow for a variety of longitudinal and multi-generational studies that explore how different generations have negotiated and transmitted diverse individual and group experiences in the form of memories and histories.
Having come from places and times of conflict and war, such as two world wars as well as conflicts in North America, the volume of essays focuses on intergenerational experiences, memories, and histories of war, flight, displacement, and resettlement. This will allow scholars of German-Canadian history to connect their studies in fruitful ways with recent research in memory and refugee studies.
Following in the path of two previous successful collections in German-Canadian History, A Chorus of Different Voices: German-Canadian Identities (eds. Angelika Sauer and Matthias Zimmer) and Beyond the Nation? Immigrants‘ Local Lives in Transnational Cultures (ed. Alexander Freund), this collection seeks to engage the newest scholarship on generation, memory, and migration to illuminate how German-Canadians have lived in Canadian societies over the past 300 years.
More broadly, this collections seeks to document the state of the art in German-Canadian History, and thus proposals for essays on all topics in the field are invited.
The University of Manitoba Press has expressed an interest in reviewing the collection for potential publication in its Studies in Immigration and Culture series.
Timeline:
- 30 April 2016: 500 word abstract and short bio
- 15 June 2016: invitations to submit essays
- 30 October 2016: 6,000 word essay (including footnotes, no bibliography or list of references; Chicago style)
- 31 January 2017: final acceptance/rejection, first round of revisions
- 31 March 2017: final revisions
- 30 April 2017: submission of manuscript to university press
For more information or questions on the project, please contact:
Dr. Alexander Freund
Chair in German-Canadian Studies
Professor of History
Co-director, Oral History Centre
The University of Winnipeg
515 Portage Avenue
Winnipeg, MB
Canada R3B 2E9
Email.