Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies, is interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism in United States history. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1998 and taught at the University of Chicago before returning to Columbia in 2006. She teaches courses on immigration history, Asian American history, and twentieth-century U.S. history. Ngai is author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004), which won the Frederick Jackson Turner prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association, among other awards. She has written on immigration history and policy matters for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and the Boston Review. She is now working on two projects, a biography of Chinese American immigrant brokers and interpreters and a comparative study of Chinese gold miners in the nineteenth-century North American West, Australia, and South Africa.