Mae Ngai

Mae Ngai is an American historian currently serving as Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University. Her work focuses on nationalism, citizenship, ethnicity, immigration, and race in 20th-century United States history.

Early life and education
Ngai is the daughter of Chinese immigrants and describes herself as a student who took a non-traditional route. She took a break from her schooling in 1972 to work as a community activist. After working in the Education and Political Action Department and the Consortium for Worker Education as a researcher and professional labor educator in an environment "where being Chinese and being American existed in tension, but not in contradiction," Ngai decided to pursue graduate school focusing on immigration studies.

Ngai holds a BA from Empire State College, a MA (1993) and PhD (1998) from Columbia University, where she wrote her dissertation under Eric Foner.

Academic career
After graduation, Ngai obtained postdoctoral fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the New York University School of Law, and, in 2003, the Radcliffe Institute. She taught at the University of Chicago as an associate professor before returning to Columbia as a full professor in 2006.

Ngai is especially interested in problems of nationalism, citizenship, and race as they are produced historically in law and society, in processes of transnational migration, and in the formation of ethno-racial communities.

In addition to publishing in numerous academic journals, Ngai has written on immigration and related policy for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and the Boston Review.

Ngai's most notable work was Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, which discusses the creation of the legal category of an "illegal alien" in the early 20th century and its social and historical consequences and context.

Courses taught

 * Immigrants in American History and Life, Lecture
 * Colonization/Decolonization, Undergraduate Seminar
 * Transnational Migration and Citizenship, Graduate & Undergraduate Seminar
 * Historiography for PhD students

Awards and honors

 * Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2022
 * Bancroft Prize, 2022
 * Shelby Collum Davis for Historical Studies, Princeton University, Spring 2018
 * Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North, Library of Congress, Fall 2017
 * Huntington Library, Spring 2017
 * Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2013
 * OAH-AHRAC China Residency Program, 2013
 * Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, 2012
 * Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library, 2012
 * Institute for Advanced Study, 2009
 * John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 2009
 * Huntington Library, 2006
 * Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians for Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, 2005
 * Theodore Saloutos Book Award, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, 2004
 * Littleton-Griswold Prize, the American Historical Association, 2004
 * Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard, 2003
 * NYU Law School, 2000
 * Social Science Research Council, 1999

Articles

 * Ron DeSantis 'Banned China From Buying Land in the State of Florida.' How Did We Get Here?" The New York Times, December 11, 2023
 * "The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law", The Journal of American History, June 1999, Vol. 86 No. 1


 * "The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien", Law and History Review, Spring 2003, Vol. 21 No. 1
 * Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton UP, 2004; 2nd ed. 2014) excerpt


 * "Birthright citizenship and the alien citizen." Fordham Law Review (2006): 2521+ online.
 * " 'A Slight Knowledge of the Barbarian Language': Chinese Interpreters in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century America." Journal of American Ethnic History 30.2 (2011): 5–32. online
 * The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America Princeton University Press, 2012).


 * "Chinese gold miners and the “Chinese question” in nineteenth-century California and Victoria." Journal of American History 101.4 (2015): 1082-1105.
 * The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (WW Norton, 2021) excerpt