Columbia Professor Mae Ngai

Denison University’s Laura C. Harris Series welcomes Mae Ngai, professor of history and Asian American studies at Columbia University, presenting “The United States as a Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea.” A U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism, Ngai is author of the award winning “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America” (2004) and “The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America” (2010). 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 she was a labor union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education. She is now working on “Yellow and Gold: The Chinese Mining Diaspora, 1848-1908,” a study of Chinese gold miners and racial politics in the 19th-century in California, the Australian colony of Victoria, and the South African Transvaal.