“The Right of Man to Migrate:” Catholic Social Thought and the Italian American Immigration Reform Movement, 1952-1965

Richard J. Klarchek Information Commons, 4th Floor, Loyola University Chicago

Dr. Battisti is an assistant professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She received her Ph.D. in U.S. History from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2010. She specializes in American immigration and ethnic history and her research looks at Italian American efforts to influence American immigration policies in the 1950s and 60s. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled,” “Whom Shall We Welcome? Italian Americans and the Politics of Immigration Reform, 1945-1965.” Battisti has published “The American Committee for Italian Migration, Anti-Communism, and Immigration Reform,” The Journal of American Ethnic History, Winter 2012; and chapters in Ethnic Families in America (Prentice Hall 2011) and Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities (Fordham UP, forthcoming 2014).