Ben Nobbs-Thiessen

Ben Nobbs-Thiessen is the newly appointed chair of Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg. He has a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of British Columbia and a Ph.D. from Emory University, and held a post-doctoral fellowship at the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. He taught in the history department at Washington State University, 2018-20. His book Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia’s Tropical Frontier, released in April from University of North Carolina Press, explores the role of migrants in the “March to the East,” a large-scale settlement and rural development initiative undertaken by the Bolivian state after the 1952 revolution. The result was an influx of hundreds of thousands of settlers in the semi-tropical Department of Santa Cruz, including indigenous Bolivians, Low German-speaking Mennonites from Canada, Paraguay and Mexico, and Japanese and Okinawan colonists re-settled after World War II.

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