Mae Ngai

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,"[2] Ngai decided to pursue graduate school focusing on immigration studies.[3]

Ngai graduated from Empire State College with a BA and Columbia University with a M.A. in 1993 and Ph.D. in 1998, where she wrote her dissertation under Eric Foner.[4]

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.[4] She taught at the University of Chicago as an associate professor before returning to Columbia as a full professor in 2006.[5]

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.[6]

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.[5]

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.[2]

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2022[7]
• Bancroft Prize, 2022[8]
• 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

• "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

• Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Princeton University Press, (2004) ISBN 978-0-691-07471-9
• Ronald H. Bayor, ed. (2004). "Race, Nation, and Citizenship in Late Nineteenth Century America". The Columbia documentary history of race and ethnicity in America. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-11994-8.
• Janice A. Radway; Kevin Gaines; Barry Shank; Penny Von Eschen, eds. (2009). "The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and the Reconstruction of Race in Immigration Law". American Studies: An Anthology. John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 978-1-4051-1351-9.
• Marc S. Rodriguez, ed. (2004). "Braceros, "Wetbacks", and the National Boundaries of Class". Repositioning North American migration history: new directions in modern continental migration, citizenship, and community. Boydell & Brewer. ISBN 978-1-58046-158-0.
• The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2010. ISBN 978-0-618-65116-0.

• Appearances on C-SPAN