Welcome to My World
In my research, teaching, and writing, I have examined some of the ways that migration and exile are experienced and voiced by migrants and their families. While research and writing have been a central part of my professional life, teaching and mentoring have also been pivotal, both in academic and less formal institutions. My books, articles, book chapters, and reviews have been published by highly-ranked publishers, magazines, and scientific journals. I have presented my research at international conferences in Canada, the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and I have taught at Concordia and McGill universities, at the University of Minnesota, and at Zayed University in Dubai. A recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and grants, I am currently a member of the McGill Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montreal.
TEDx Talk
In 1834, about 5 letters were mailed per person per year in England. Today, we receive more email than we have time to read. Love them or hate them, we blast others and are bombarded in return with social messages. Is our ability to connect massively and instantaneously making us feel any closer to each other? Or, are we now also falling into the trap of what George Bernard Shaw had warned us: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”?
In the talk, Sonia shares with us the discoveries of her research on how couples and families separated by migration wrote through letters about their joy and pain of love. If we pick up pen and paper to write to our loved ones, what would we write…?
Canadian historian, Dr. Sonia Cancian studies how migration has shaped gender, family, and emotional dynamics of migrants and their transnational families in Canada and Italy in the 20th century. She is best known as an expert in migrant letters, and especially love letters written in contexts of migration with the publication of numerous articles and her books, With Your Words in My Hands: The Letters of Antonietta Petris and Loris Palma (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021), Emotional Landscapes: Love, Gender, and Migration, edited by Marcelo Borges, Sonia Cancian, and Linda Reeder (University of Illinois Press, 2021), Migrant Letters, edited by Sonia Cancian and Marcelo Borges (Routledge, 2018), and Families, Lovers, and their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2010). In 2008-2009, Sonia Cancian initiated the Digitizing Immigrant Letters Project with Professor Donna Gabaccia at the University of Minnesota's Immigration History Research Center Archives.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.
Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx​
Digitizing Immigrant Letters
The Digitizing Immigrant Letters Project was initiated by myself and Professor Donna R. Gabaccia in 2008-2009 at the University of Minnesota and its partner locations where symposia, conferences, workshops, an exhibit, and other events were also held over the years. The aim of the project is to illustrate the intersections of intimacy and migration through varied selections of letters penned by migrants and their significant others from the 1850s to the 1970s in the U.S., Canada, and internationally. The website features diverse letter collections available in their original languages and translated into English. Many of the letters are drawn from the Immigration History Research Center Archives at the University of Minnesota; new collections of letters are continually added to the award-winning Project.