This section is reserved for presentations of WEMov’s Early Career Investigators (ECIs). For this 4th newsletter, we are featuring our colleagues WG1 leader Katelin Parsons and WG4 member Fabrice Langrognet.
Dr. Katelin Parsons is a postdoctoral researcher at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík, Iceland, and the project manager for the Fragile Heritage Project. She graduated from the University of Iceland in November 2020, several months after joining the COST network Women on the Move. She currently divides most of her time between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, but she can also be found in the present day in Working Group 1.
She emigrated to Iceland at the age of 18 and has been a citizen since 2014. Her personal migration experience has inspired her to study the women who crossed the Atlantic in the centuries before budget airlines and the Internet made regular contact with friends and families an option. She is currently working on a paper on women migrants in seventeenth-century Iceland in a volume co-edited by Mateusz Wyżga (WG1), Katja Tikka and Lauri Uusitalo.
In 2021, she was awarded the inaugural Goodman Emerging Writer’s Grant to write about the impact of mass emigration on manuscript culture in East Iceland. East Iceland was the birthplace of many talented women writers who emigrated to Canada and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The sparsely population region was severely impacted by volcanic activity in 1874-1875, and large family groups began leaving for North America in 1876.
The Fragile Heritage Project (2015-present) is an initiative to undertake digital collection of Icelandic emigrants’ manuscripts, diaries, letters and other documents in Canada and the United States. Many of these materials are found in private homes, and working with families is a key part of this project. From this work comes her research interest in migrants’ presence in the archives of their home and receiving countries.
Featured publications:
Katelin Parsons.“Raven Tracks Across the Prairies: Icelandic Immigration and Manuscript Culture in the Canadian West.” In The Icelandic Heritage in North America, ed. by Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir, Höskuldur Þráinsson and Úlfar Bragason. (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, forthcoming).
Katelin Parsons. “Albert Jóhannesson and the Scribes of Hecla Island: Manuscript Culture and Scribal Production in an Icelandic-Canadian Settlement.” Gripla XXX (2019): 7–46.
Awards:
2021 – Goodman Emerging Writer’s Grant
2020 – Doctoral Studies Grant, University of Iceland School of Humanities Education Fund
2019 – Det Arnamagnæanske Statsstipendium
2019 – Research Grant, Styrktarsjóður Áslaugar Hafliðadóttur
2018 – CINS Graduate Scholarship for PhD Studies
Fabrice Langrognet is a lawyer and a historian of migration and asylum. After serving for five years as a senior judge in the administrative branch of the French judiciary, specializing in immigration and asylum cases, he completed in 2019 a PhD in migration history at the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates scholar. His doctoral thesis has been turned into a monograph entitled Neighbours of Passage: A Microhistory of Migrants in a Paris Tenement, 1882-1932 (Routledge, Microhistories series, 2022). Before his PhD, Fabrice graduated from the École normale supérieure LSH, Sciences-Po, ÉNA and EHESS, all in France. Fabrice is now a Leverhulme fellow at the University of Oxford (2021–24), where his research deals with refugee history, in particular asylum procedures at European airports in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the history of climate migrations. Fabrice is also an associate researcher at the Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains, a joint University of Paris 1/CNRS lab, where he was the co-leader of a research project entitled “Migrants in working-class housing” (ICM grant, 2019–21). Building on this research project, Fabrice is currently co-curating a temporary exhibition called La Vie HLM (Aubervilliers, France, Oct. 2021-June 2022). In 2020–21, Fabrice was a visiting research scholar and Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University. He is also a member of COST Network “Women on the Move” (WG4), a fellow at the Institut Convergences Migrations (Paris) and at the Global Public Policy Institute (Berlin).
List of publications (selection):
Fabrice Langrognet, Neighbours of Passage: A Microhistory of Migrants in a Paris Tenement, 1882-1932, Abingdon: Routledge, Microhistories series, 2022.
Fabrice Langrognet, “The import-export trade of underage glassworkers in Saint-Denis, France (1892-1914),” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Vol. 15 (2022), No. 1, 112–30.
Fabrice Langrognet, “Geodesic distance as metric of cross-group networks in migration history,” Journal of Migration History, Vol. 6 (2020), 405–28.
Fabrice Langrognet, “The crossings of Louis Pirolli, a migrant among others (1886-1953),” Quaderni Storici, Vol. 54 (2019), No. 3, 831–57.
Fabrice Langrognet, “Interethnic resentment or mundane grudges? A 1900 Paris fight under the microscope,” Immigrants and Minorities. Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora, Vol. 37 (2019), Nos. 1-2, 24–43.
Fabrice Langrognet, “The best interests of the child in French deportation case law,” Human Rights Law Review, Vol. 18 (2018), No. 3, 567–92.
Fabrice Langrognet, “Contingent minorities: what the Great War meant for the migrant youth of the Plaine-Saint-Denis,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Vol. 11 (2018), No. 2, 208–26.
Fabrice Langrognet, “Accueil et représentations des migrants en temps de guerre : les étrangers à la Plaine-Saint-Denis, 1914-1919,” Migrance, No. 45–6 (2016), 161–72.