Education
Ph.D. – Columbia University, 1998
M.A. – Columbia University, 1993
B.A. – SUNY - Empire State, 1992

Current Departmental Service
US Area Chair
Personnel Committee

Interests and Research

Mae M. Ngai, Professor of History and Lung FamilyProfessor of Asian American Studies, is a U.S. legal and political historianinterested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. Shereceived her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1998 and taught at the University ofChicago before returning to Columbia in 2006. Ngai is author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and theMaking of Modern America (Princeton 2004) and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of ChineseAmerica (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010). Professor Ngai has heldfellowships from the Social Science Research Council, NYU Law School, RadcliffeInstitute for Advanced Study, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation andInstitute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Ngai has written on immigrationhistory and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times,the Nation, and the Boston Review. Before becoming a historian Ngai was alabor-union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education. She is now working on Yellow andGold: The Chinese Mining Diaspora, 1848-1908, a study of Chinese goldminers in the nineteenth-century North American West, Australia, and SouthAfrica.

Affiliations:

Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race

Editorial Board, International Labor and Working ClassHistory

Editorial Board, Journal of American Ethnic History

Editorial Board, Law and History Review