untangle Polish colonial desires and to analyze Polish agency and implication in the colonization of others.
This book has benefited from many extraordinary people who kindly supported me through research and several stages of the writing process. I am most grateful to Geoff Eley and Brian Porter-Szücs for believing in the project from the very beginning and for helping me so much over the years with their generous mentorship. Nancy Rose Hunt and George Steinmetz provided theoretical guidance when I was formulating my research questions. I want to thank them for encouraging me to think outside the box, across regional and disciplinary boundaries. Julia Hell, Frederick Cooper, Jane Burbank, Mamadou Diouf, and David Cohen offered early support and taught me greatly about imperial and colonial studies. Kathleen Canning gave me the opportunity to work under her wing at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, where I was able to collaborate with Bob Bain and Douglas Northrop and expand my research interests into world history and global studies. I am also grateful to numerous colleagues and friends in Ann Arbor for providing me with a nurturing intellectual community, which helped shape my work in significant ways.
After finishing my graduate studies, I was fortunate enough to become the assistant director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) at the University of Michigan (U-M). LACS gave me the chance to work closely with many distinguished scholars whose transregional inquiries motivated me to delve into the study of central European migration to Latin America, particularly the Polish diaspora in Brazil. I am indebted to LACS former directors Alexandra M. Stern, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, and Richard L. Turits for supporting my research and teaching activities. They kindly afforded me multiple professional development opportunities, which were fundamental for my academic growth and the book project. At LACS, I always counted on the assistance and generosity of amazing colleagues and friends. I want to thank particularly Sueann Caulfield, Rebecca J. Scott, Paulina Alberto, and visiting scholars Keila Grinberg and Flávio Limoncic for their encouragement and for teaching me so much about Brazilian culture and history. I would also like to express my sincere appreciation and gratitude to Bebete Martins and Howard I. Tsai, my writing companions during the completion of the manuscript. I especially thank them for being a major support throughout the process and for all the fond times we shared at LACS and beyond.
I also want to acknowledge the contribution that my current home institution, the Center for Latin American Studies (LAS) at the University of Florida, has made to the project. The Center funded a research trip to Rio de Janeiro, where I was able to gather key sources regarding the establishment of Polish colonies in Brazil. LAS has been quite supportive of my academic endeavors and has quickly turned into my second home. I would like to thank LAS faculty, staff, and students for welcoming me into the family and for making my transition to Florida a smooth one. I am particularly grateful to LAS director Philip J. Williams for his assistance and guidance. Susan Paulson, Efraín Barradas, Rosana Resende, Catherine Tucker, Mary Risner, Glenn Galloway, Nicholas Vargas, Welson Tremura, and Paul Losch have all been exceptional colleagues. My graduate assistants, Lisa Krause and Anna Rodell, have also been a great support and source of inspiration.
Writing this book would not have been possible without the financial contribution received from the University of Michigan, mainly from the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the Department of History, the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, the International Institute, LACS, and the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. A Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Grant and a Rackham Merit Fellowship helped me conduct research in Germany and Poland from 2003 to 2005. LACS supported my first research trip to Brazil in 2012 and the University of Florida funded a second one in 2016. The generous support provided by these and other institutions allowed me to disseminate the ideas presented in this book in workshops, conferences, and annual meetings organized by prestigious entities such as the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; the American Historical Association; the German Historical Institute; the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America; the São Paulo School of Advanced Studies on the Globalization of Culture in the Nineteenth Century; and the Polish Emigration Museum (Gdynia).
Parts of the preface and introduction of this book were presented in the conference “Thinking through the Cultural Turn—A Generation Reflects: Writing Histories in an Interdisciplinary and Transnational Age,” which I organized in Puerto Rico in 2007 with colleagues from U-M and the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). The conference paper titled “An Ethnography of Knowledge: Doctors in Motion, Imperial Agendas, and the Study of Polish and German Subjectivities from a (Post) Colonial Perspective” was included in one of the numbers of Historia y Sociedad (published by UPR), which commemorated the event and a follow-up workshop held in Michigan in 2009. An earlier version of the first chapter and parts of the conclusion were published as “An Empire of Scientific Experts: Polish Physicians and the Medicalization of the German Borderlands, 1880–1918,” in Liberal Imperialism in Europe: An Anthology, edited by Matthew P. Fitzpatrick. I want to thank the editorial board of Historia y Sociedad and Palgrave Macmillan for allowing me to include these works in this book.
My editors at Ohio University Press, John J. Bukowczyk and Gillian Berchowitz, have been truly amazing throughout the process of shaping my ideas into a coherent book. I thank them wholeheartedly for their encouragement and guidance and for their infinite patience. John has become a true mentor to me. His perceptive remarks helped me improve the manuscript in so many ways. I also want to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and copyeditor Ed Vesneske Jr. for their useful and insightful comments. Their questions and assessments allowed me to enrich the analysis and take my ideas in new directions.
During the time I did my main research work in Europe, I felt incredibly at home in Poland, and both Warsaw and Poznań became treasured cities to me. People were generally open and curious to learn about my project, which greatly helped improve my Polish and made the research process less lonely. I want to thank Tomasz Kizwalter (University of Warsaw), Magdalena Gawin (then at the Polish Academy of Sciences), Roman Meissner (Poznań University of Medical Sciences), Marek Czapliński (University of Wrocław), and Antoni Kuczyński (University of Wrocław) for taking the time to meet and share with me their work and expertise. I am also grateful to the many archivists and librarians in Germany, Poland, and Brazil who kindly assisted me in my research. Teodoro Alves and Maureen Elina Javorski at the Public Archives of Paraná (Arquivo Público do Paraná) were fundamental in providing me with key sources and materials about the Polish colonies in Brazil. I want to thank them for their great generosity and for the sources they sent me upon my return from the archives. I am also grateful to José Juan Pérez Meléndez at UC Davis for sharing with me his ideas on colonization policies in Brazil and pointing me towards the Brazilian National Archives in Rio de Janeiro.
This project also benefited from the conversations I have maintained throughout all these years with advisers and professors from my alma mater, the University of Puerto Rico. Carlos Pabón, Luis E. Agrait, Astrid Cubano Iguina, María del Carmen Baerga, Mayra Rosario Urrutia, and Carlos Ramos inspired me to become a historian and pursue my PhD degree. As a first-generation college graduate, I want to thank them for always being supportive of my academic pursuits.
I reserve my final thanks to my friends and family. I am deeply grateful to Juan R. Hernández García and Marie Cruz Soto for their love and continuous support. They have been my accomplices in most of my academic and personal adventures. My heartfelt thanks also go to many friends from my Ann Arbor years who offered me their assistance in varied ways. Among them, I want to thank Katie Wroblewski, Asli Gur, Rose Peruski, Emil Kerenji, Edin Hajdarpašić, Olivera Jokić, Rebecca Pite, Alice Weinreb, You-Sun Crystal Chung, Rebecca Grapevine, Emily Klencher, Susan Hwang, Yan Long, Dáša Frančíková, Alice Huang, Cheryl Israel, and Tae Woolfort.
Over the course of my academic journey, my family has been my refuge and major source of inspiration. My deepest gratitude goes to my parents, who worked extremely hard to give me an education. My siblings Rosa Elena, José Reynaldo, María Estela, and Yessenia Mercedes made me immensely happy growing up. Without their love, and my mother’s sense of humor, I would have never made it this far.
