CFP: Immigration and Entrepreneurship—An Interdisciplinary Conference

An interdisciplinary conference on "Immigration and Entrepreneurship" will be held in Fall 2012, cosponsored by the Center for the History of New America (University of Maryland), the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (University of Maryland), and the German Historical Institute (Washington, D.C.). Conveners are David B. Sicilia and David F. Barbe, University of Maryland, College Park, and Hartmut Berghoff, German Historical Institute and University of Göttingen. The call for papers states, in part:

The United States has long been an immigrant society as well as an entrepreneurial society. This is no coincidence: immigrants launch new enterprises and invent new technologies at rates much higher than native-born Americans. As the volume of in-migration again approaches that of the “new immigration” at the turn of the twentieth century, it is time to measure how immigrants have shaped the American economy in the past and how immigration policy reform in 1965 has fostered the transformation of business and economic life in the United States.  How have newcomers shaped and in turn been shaped by American economic life?

Proposals for papers are invited from scholars working in a variety of disciplines–including but not limited to history, sociology, economics, business administration, entrepreneurial studies, anthropology, and cultural studies. Comparative studies across time and place are especially welcomed.

The conference will engage these and related research topics:

• immigrant group styles and patterns of entrepreneurship
• immigrant entrepreneurship and U.S. economic development
• geography of ethnic entrepreneurship
• journeys of successful high-tech entrepreneurs
• immigrant entrepreneurs as small proprietors
• success and failure narratives and other discourse surrounding ethnic immigrant entrepreneurship
• barriers to immigrant entrepreneurial success
• policy implications of historical and contemporary research on immigrant entrepreneurship

For full consideration, please submit a 200-word abstract and a short c.v. to immigrantentrepreneurs@umd.edu by September 15, 2011. The full call for papers can be found on the GHI website.

The conference will take place in College Park, MD, and Washington, D.C., in the fall of 2012. Presenters will be given accommodations and a travel stipend. Selected conference presenters will be invited to publish their work in an edited scholarly volume of essays that will grow out of the conference.