Mae Ngai

Mae M. Ngai, Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies, is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1998 and taught at the University of Chicago before returning to Columbia in 2006. Ngai is author of IMPOSSIBLE SUBJECTS: ILLEGAL ALIENS AND THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA (Princeton, 2004) and THE LUCKY ONES: ONE FAMILY AND THE EXTRAORDINARY INVENTION...See more

Mae M. Ngai, Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies, is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1998 and taught at the University of Chicago before returning to Columbia in 2006. Ngai is author of IMPOSSIBLE SUBJECTS: ILLEGAL ALIENS AND THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA (Princeton, 2004) and THE LUCKY ONES: ONE FAMILY AND THE EXTRAORDINARY INVENTION OF CHINESE AMERICA (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). Professor Ngai has held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, NYU Law School, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and the Boston Review. Before becoming a historian Ngai was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City. She is now working on YELLOW AND GOLD: THE CHINESE MINING DIASPORA, 1848-1908, a study of Chinese goldminers in the nineteenth-century North American West, Australia, and South Africa. See less