Kathleen N. Conzen is the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor Emerita of American History at the University of Chicago, where she also served as chair of the department. Her research and teaching focus is on the social and political history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a special interest in issues of immigration, ethnicity, religion, western settlement, and urban development. Much of her research and writing has used the German immigrant experience to explore the links between migration processes and community formation, the construction and reconstruction of ethnic identities, the the relationship between religious, ethnic, and regional cultures, and the political integration of immigrants into the national community. Current projects include books nearing completion on nineteenth-century German-American efforts to develop and defend a theory of pluralistic democratic nationalism, and on German peasant settlement in the frontier Midwest, and work-in-progress on America’s diasporic German Catholic milieu, and on patterns of rural-to-urban migration in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US. Her most recent book is Germans in Minnesota (2003).