Mae Ngai


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

Life

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 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.

Education

Ngai graduated from Empire State College with a BA, from Columbia University with a M.A. in 1993, and Ph.D. in 1998, where she wrote her dissertation under Eric Foner.
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.

Career

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 is 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

*
*