CSL Welcomes Dr. Patrick Ireland as New Chair of Social Sciences Department
CSL Dean Buck McMorris welcomes Dr. Patrick Ireland as the new chairman of the Social Sciences Department. Professor Ireland assumed his duties at the beginning of the semester. A native of Michigan, he most recently taught at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, including comparative politics, research methodologies, and international political economy.
Previously, he earned a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree at University of Texas School of Public Health and helped to implement a development grant on the U.S.-Mexican border, as well as secure grants for migrant health, infectious disease control, bi-national social policy coordination and environmental justice.
He also has taught at Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Denver, Connecticut College, University of Mohammed V in Morocco (as a Fulbright Senior Scholar), University of Michigan, University of Ghana (West Africa) and University of Tubingen (Germany).
He has received teaching and research awards from the University of Denver, Connecticut College and Harvard University. As a teacher, "Always, the primary instructional goal for me is to help students build their capacity to engage in critical thinking and analysis," he said.
Professor Ireland's research focuses on migration, international studies and immigration, and it embraces both theory and fieldwork, such as in European immigrant neighborhoods. His current work considers the broader relationships between migration and development in Europe/Middle East/North Africa and the U.S./Mexico. His research as been funded by the American Political Science Association, Chateaubriand Fellowship Program, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, European Commission, Fulbright-Hays program, German Marshall Fund, Krupp foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Social Science Research Council.
After Beirut, "It's been great to be able to move to Chicago and IIT. It really feels like coming home to me," he said. Besides his Michigan and South Bend, IN, connections, he said, he recently learned that two distant relatives graduated from the Lewis Institute (a predecessor school to IIT) in the early 1900s.
"For someone with research interests like mine, this is a great place to be," he added. "My work has focused on migration and ethnic relations, and I have been looking recently at Moroccan migrants in Europe as agents of social and political development. I hope to study Mexican hometown associations here in Chicago and thereby add a cross-regional comparative element."
"Moreover, our department has a special strength in urban and ethnic studies, and I have several new colleagues whose work complements my own," he added. "We hope to develop further such strong suits and strengthen our programs generally."
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