Michael Kaelin

Biography

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and a predoctoral fellow at Penn State University’s Richards Center for Civil War Era Studies. My dissertation, “Selected Lives: Immigrant Community and the Origins of Federal Immigration Policy in New York, 1847-1882,” examines German and Irish American participation in New York State’s Board of Commissioners of Emigration, the body that regulated immigration into New York in the mid-nineteenth century. Arguing that foreign-born actors centrally shaped the Board’s policies and procedures, it reveals that this system reflected German and Irish American conceptions of “worthiness” and proper behavior among new immigrants. Their ideologies and practices were embedded in the first federal system in 1882, for which the New York apparatus served as the primary model. My work has been supported by the German Historical Institute, the German Society of Pennsylvania, and the Peter Paul Miller Educational Travel Fund.

B.A., Duke University

• U.S./North American History
• War in Society and Culture

• The Watch Over-the-Rhine: Violence and Citizenship in Antebellum Cincinnati

• Selected Lives: Immigrant Community and the Origins of Federal Immigration Policy in New York, 1847-1882

• “Emigrant Letter Writers as Immigrant Regulation Agents: A Reconsideration of Epistolary Practices among 19th Century German and Irish Americans,” Yearbook of German American Studies 57 (2022): 13-30.

• History 120 – Europe and the Modern World, 1815 to the Present
• History 136 – Sport, Recreation, and Society in the United States
• History/Asian American Studies 160 – Asian American History: Processes of Movement and Dislocation
• History 201 – Russia Engages America, America Engages Russia
• History 357 – The Second World War
• History/Afro-American Studies 393 – Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction

• History 136 – Sport, Recreation, and Society in the United States (Summer 2024, Summer 2025)
• History 200 – Liberty and the American Revolution
• History 201 – Coming to America: Histories of American Migrations