Brian Gratton

Bio

Professor, Department of History, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Research Interests and Selected Publications

Brian Gratton studies immigration and ethnicity in the United States, Latin America and Europe. Dr. Gratton received his Ph.D. in 1980 from Boston University and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Case Western Reserve University from 1981 to 1983. He began as an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University in 1983, became Associate Professor in 1987 and Full Professor in 1994. His initial research, summarized in Old Age and the Search for Security, focused on social security, retirement and the circumstances of the American elderly. Although he continues this interest, his principal emphasis is now in immigration and migration, particularly among Hispanics. He worked on these subjects while a Fulbright Fellow in Spain (1996) and in Ecuador (2002). In 2003 and 2004, as a Fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, he wrote on the issue of assimilation among immigrant-origin persons, tracing generational fortunes from 1850 to the present.

His publications on ethnicity and immigration in the United States, Ecuador and Europe include articles in the Population and Development Review, The History of the Family, Journal of American Ethnic History, Professional Geographer, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Historical Statistics of the United States and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. During 1996–97, Dr. Gratton was a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, developing a new series of representative samples of Hispanic and other immigrant-origin groups from the United States Censuses. This project led in 1999 to a two-year research grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to study assimilation trajectories in Mexican-American families. With support from the National Institute on Aging in 2003-2007, he extended this research to historical analysis of elderly immigrants ( Funded Projects). He is now engaged in reexamining Mexican American demography and geography in the American Southwest and writing a sociopolitical account of 400 years of immigration to what is now the United States, a broad consideration of demography, popular reaction and public policy.

His teaching reflects these research interests, including undergraduate and graduate courses on US immigration history and ethnicity.  he has also been the Director or Co-Director of four Teaching American History  projects funded by the Department of Education, which have linked professors in the Department of History to public school teachers in various districts in Maricopa County.

Research Interests

Immigration, ethnicity and immigration policy in the United States, Latin America and Europe. Mexican Aemrican Geography and Settlement. Family and Demography