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Centre for Justice, Equity, and Sustainable Action (JESA)

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Ian Rocksborough-Smith, PhD

Associate Professor

History

Abbotsford campus, D3016

Phone: 604-504-7441 local 4702

email Ian

Biography

I teach mainly U.S. history at the University of the Fraser Valley. My research interests include the study of late 19th and 20th Century United States, public history, social movements, and histories of race, labor, religion, and empire in the Atlantic world. 

 

Education

  • PhD, University of Toronto
  • MA, Simon Fraser University

Teaching Interests

  • U.S. and Canadian history; public history; race, class and populism; urban and gender studies

Publications

Books/Monographs:

  • Black Public History in Chicago: Civil Rights Activism from World War II into the Cold War. (Chicago/Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018).

Research articles, review essays, and chapters in edited volumes:

  • “The Ambiguities of Catholic White Racial Liberalism: A Case Study in the Aftermath of the Cicero 1951 Race Riot,” Faith and Freedom: A Journal of Progressive Religion, Harris Manchester College, Oxford University 75 (part 2):195 (Autumn & Winter 2022): 87-104.
  • “The Limits of Racial Liberalism and the History of U.S. Urban Housing Practices,” review essay of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) for Reviews in History(review no. 2462) (July 2022): 6 pages.
  • “A Brooklyn You Might Not Know,” review essay of Thomas J. Campanella, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019) for Reviews in American History49:4 (December 2021): 625-632.
  • “Analyzing Urban Uprisings in the Global West: Recent Interpretive Challenges,” review essay of Mustafa Diken, Urban Rage: The Revolt of the Excluded(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); Peter B. Levy, The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America during the 1960s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Mike King, When Riot Cops Are Not Enough: The Policing and Repression of Occupy Oakland (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017) for the Journal of Urban History; J. Samuel Walker, Most of 14th Street is Gone: The Washington, D.C. Riots of 1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) for the Journal of Urban History 46:2 (March 2020): 420-426.
  • “Hope and Despair in Twentieth-Century Black Chicago,” review essay of Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) and Brian McCammack, Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017) for The Journal of African American History 105:1 (Winter 2020): 112-122.
  • “The Independence, Diversity, and Vitality of Early Black Chicago,” review of Margaret Garb, Freedom's Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago From Abolition to the Great Migration(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Christopher Reed, Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900-1919 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014) for Reviews in American History 43:4 (December 2015): 665-673.
  • “‘I had gone in there thinking I was going to be a cultural worker’: Richard Durham, Oscar Brown, Jr. and the United Packinghouse Workers Association in Chicago, 1949-1955,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 109:3 (Fall 2016): 252-299.
  • “Margaret T.G. Burroughs and Black Public History in Cold War Chicago,” The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research41:3 (Fall 2011): 26-42.
  • “Reframing Black Internationalism and Civil Rights during the Cold War,” co-authored with John J. Munro, Journal of American Studies of Turkey29 (Spring 2009): 63-79.
  • “Filling the Gap: Intergenerational Black Radicalism and the Popular Front Ideals of FreedomwaysMagazine, 1961-1965,” Afro-Americans in New York Life & History 31:1 (January 2007): 7-42.
  • “Police Red Squads, the Radical Left, and Black History Activism in Cold War Chicago: The Surveillance State as Archive?” in Erik S. Gellman, Simon Balto, Marcia Walker-McWilliams, Eds. Revisiting the Black Metropolis: New Histories of Black Chicago (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming 2025/6): 28 pages.

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